Patti Smith's M Train: M is for mystery or memory or memento mori

Not many people can succeed in quite different areas of artistic endeavour. Patti Smith does. She began as a poet, created an incendiary stage persona as a rock star, with Horses an acknowledged classic. To her list of achievements she would undoubtedly add the reclusive years she spent raising her children, and her stills photography, which has been exhibited in its own right. Then, later in life and a widow, she established herself as a memoir writer of uncommon ability. Just Kids, about her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award.

M Train is another memoir, M for mystery, or memory, or memento mori. It is a portrait of the artist as ageing bohemian, setting off at nine each morning to write in a cafe. Coffee would seem to be Smith's only vice, and there is enough here to delight the inner-city hipsters and baristas. At one stage she nearly opened a coffee shop in New York. (Chorus of: "Cool!" and "Why ever not?")

Woven into the fabric of a largely solitary but very full life are dreams, reveries, and much travelling: in memory, or performing at cultural events, Tangiers for the Beats, Mexico for Frida Kahlo. She is, of course, very serious. Just Kids detailed ferocious dedication to becoming an artworker, with rather less of the joie de vivre found in Henri Murger's La Vie de Boheme. Irony is absent from this book, nor is it marked by humour. Yet you forgive her because she has so little personal vanity, shown by her splendidly grumpy cover photo. And she writes so beautifully (with a few exceptions, when the copyeditor seems too overawed to intervene).

We get a healthy helping of her cultural influences, from French poets to Murakami and TV police dramas. When her husband, MC5 guitarist Fred Sonic Smith took her on a pre-baby tour, she chose French Guinea, for a Jean Genet association. Fannishly, she collected stones from St Laurent prison, to give to Genet. At the end of the book she lays them on his gravesite, showing a reverence for relics that suggests High Catholicism. She may be more spiritual than conventionally religious, but she washes and cares for the graves of those she reveres, across cultures. Elsewhere she writes: "Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book."

Although she cites some women artists – Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo – her life of art is dominated by males. Marital life with Fred Smith may have been boho, but it was conventionally domestic for Patti. As a memoir writer she has limits in not knowing Fred when he was most politically/musically engaged, in the MC5. That band was genuinely revolutionary, naively so, but still harassed by the authorities. It seems to have scarred Fred Smith, with rumours of hard drinking and even violence. Yet, for Patti, they had a "common mind".  She is, of course, custodian of the family memories, for her children's sake, relics such as the shirts she still retains, after decades as a widow. Yet the album she made with him, Dream of Life, was not their personal best. Before and after Fred are her artistic zeniths.

"Images have their way of dissolving and then abruptly returning, pulling along the joy and pain attached to them like tin cans rattling from the back of her an old-fashioned wedding vehicle," she writes. There can be few better summations of the memoir craft. She sits in her cafe, coffee and notebook in hand, reflecting on the losses and gains of a well-spent life. Words are her art, and she deploys them magnificently.