Patti Smith wrote this in her forties, a short book about being a child in southern New Jersey — the fields behind the house, the woolgatherers she imagined moving through them at dusk, a slaughterhouse, a cloud museum, her brother and sister, and the moment she understood she was going to be an artist. It runs a little over a hundred pages and reads like a prose poem, with her own photographs. She wrote it during a period when she was out of public life, and it’s the loosest and most enchanted thing she’s published.
Woolgathering