I’ve really enjoyed Patti Smith’s new memoir - the most poetic and free-flowing thing of hers that I’ve read so far. It’s been an interesting life - from pretty dire poverty, loneliness and sickness in childhood through the hardscrabble life as a young artist and then the right-time-right-place global success of Horses, launching her into a world where people like Burroughs and Ginsberg and Dylan become friends and associates.

She has a tendency to mythologise her friendships, and elevate her favourite artists to saintly iconic figures (there’s a lot of pilgrimages and visits to graveyards and shrines here), but that motivation comes from a place of real love and kindness, I think, and so it’s honest. Her writing is occasionally loose and full of images and sensations that leave me a little earthbound, but she has a power to pull me on as a reader.

I confess to never having been a fan of the recorded work. But I love the fact of the existence of Patti Smith: Her heart, her drive to work and her abiding love and sense of wonder.

And despite the overwhelming weight of grief after grief that descends upon her in the middle part of her life, Patti continues to write, to perform, to find beauty and meaning in so many things. She really is an inspiration, and her Instagram feed is a model of personal expression, restraint and beauty, if you haven’t visited it.