Patti Smith, Survivor

One bright afternoon last month, the Rockaways’ meticulously restored boardwalk gleamed in the sun, as did Patti Smith’s sparsely furnished one-room bungalow a half-block away, the light filtering through the wisps of white linen that draped the new windows. Its minuscule front porch overlooked a raggedy yard turfed with weeds and wildflowers.

“It’s the first place I’ve ever lived where I made all the choices,” Ms. Smith said proudly, noting that she has stripped it of closets, doors and rooms. “I don’t like anything superfluous.”

An armchair wore a Jerry Garcia blanket; a day bed, a colorful textile. Ms. Smith wore torn jeans and a crisp blazer.

“Throughout my life, I happily deferred to family, companions, children,” she said. “This was mine. I didn’t have to compromise, and I say that in the best of ways.”

In 1994, within the space of a few weeks, Ms. Smith lost her husband, the musician Fred Sonic Smith, to heart failure, and her brother, Todd Smith, who was also her road manager, to a stroke. Almost two decades later, Ms. Smith was still making peace with their absence. Those losses, and newer, fresher sorrows, pierce her elegiac new book, “M Train,” which in its own elliptical way is as much a love story about her late husband as “Just Kids,” her stunning 2010 memoir of youth and bohemia, was about Robert Mapplethorpe.

The book, out next week, is a sort of first salvo before the 40th anniversary of “Horses,” the 68-year-old poet/rocker/visual artist/author’s historic first album. Ms. Smith, who spent her summer on a 45-city concert tour of Europe, is about to embark on an 18-city book tour, after which follows another grueling performance schedule that has her working, quite happily, into January.

It was the publication of “Just Kids” in 2010 and its National Book Award, which Ms. Smith won that year, that transmogrified the punk poet from downtown cult figure into someone more socially omnipresent, a cheerful participant in the larger cultural stew. (The book’s commercial success also inspired a wave of memoirs by female rockers, like those of Chrissie Hynde and Kim Gordon, among others, out this year.)

This past year, in particular, Ms. Smith has seemed globally, impossibly, ubiquitous. There she was at a Sundance Film Festival party, the Golden Globe Awards, the Critics’ Choice Awards. She appeared on a Hudson River cruise with Karl Lagerfeld; at Barneys for a book party for Ann Demeulemeester, the Belgian designer; at Da Silvano’s 40th anniversary. She gave an impromptu concert at an event sponsored by Dom Pérignon. She performed at fund-raisers (for Tibet House and for the blast victims of last spring’s East Village fire), spoke at Amnesty International’s award ceremony in Berlin and cuddled the Dalai Lama at the Glastonbury Festival, where she led the crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” to the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, who turned 80 a week later. Next year, she’ll appear on a calendar, joining Yoko Ono, Serena Williams and other “iconic” women photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Pirelli, the Italian tire company.

“I think ‘Just Kids’ put her in the public eye in a much bigger way than she had been before,” said Ira Silverberg, an adviser to the William S. Burroughs estate and a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. “She took on the status of cultural icon, whereas before she had been more of a cult figure. Did that make her more social? She certainly became more available, and toured more extensively. It was as if during her marriage the pause button was hit, and when it was over she was back in her milieu and being feted for a life well lived.”

This peripatetic life is chronicled in “M Train,” a series of journeys through cities, hotels, dreams and memories. The M stands for mind, and Ms. Smith is her train’s conductor. As such, she has written a book that is memoirish, but not strictly a memoir. There are brief, sweet scenes from her 14-year marriage, when she and Mr. Smith mostly dropped out of public life and raised their son and daughter in St. Clair Shores, Mich. — listening to Coltrane and Detroit Tigers games in a busted Chris-Craft that was moored in their yard; making a pilgrimage to French Guiana to gather a stone from the ruin of the former penal colony to take to her hero, Jean Genet.

Within this Proustian tour of love, loss and survival, leavened with comedic digressions, Ms. Smith finds solace in a century-old bungalow in the Rockaways, which she bought just a few weeks before Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. The house survived, but just barely. Her neighbors draped it with an American flag, protecting it from looters. My Alamo, she calls the place.

Ms. Smith had to buy the house without a mortgage because it had tax liens and was in terrible physical shape. To raise the money, just a bit over $200,000, she hustled hard, working for three months straight through the summer of 2012, performing 50 to 60 concerts, she estimated, all over the world. She did acoustic sets, poetry readings and lectures, sometimes two in a day.

“You know I have a lot of energy, and I like to work,” she said. “I come from a working-class family, and I’ve been working since I was 13, from babysitting to blueberry picking to factory work to bookstore work. And of course, being a mother and homemaker, the hardest work of all.”

Ms. Smith is clearly game for anything, and chasing her obsessions, which are mostly literary, she winds up in curious places. Hoping to locate and photograph the boots of the scientist Alfred Wegener, an early proponent of the continental drift theory — Ms. Smith loves polar exploration, and Wegener died on an expedition in Greenland — Ms. Smith finds an opportunity to photograph the chess table used by Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972; it was in a basement in Reykjavik, Iceland. But first, she must oversee a local chess match, though her interest in chess is purely aesthetic, she writes, and her expertise nonexistent. Afterward, she finds herself in a midnight meeting with Fischer himself, deflecting his paranoid ravings by singing Buddy Holly songs at full throttle until just before dawn.

This collision with Fischer in 2007 had a peculiar aftermath. “I had met him before,” she said. “When I was a young girl at Scribner’s in the late ’60s, I had the game department. He was supposed to do a book signing, and I stacked up all the books, and a lot of people came. He appeared very nervous, and he was only a couple of years older than me. He couldn’t handle it, and I had to sneak him out the back door.”

In Reykjavik, she said, she told him of their long-ago encounter, not that he remembered. “I told him how we’d met before, and he said, ‘Can you still order books?’ ” As it happens, Ms. Smith, being a bibliophile, has a network of rare-book contacts, and she promised to help him out. “If a book can be found, I can find it,” she said. And so it was that for a time before Fischer’s death in 2008, Ms. Smith was his go-to for obscure history books.

What’s always been striking about Ms. Smith is that she is a bit of a nerd, the once dreamy, bookish, sickly child who loved Louisa May Alcott and “Pinocchio” (she still has the copy her mother gave her, its pages a bit crumbly, on a table in the Rockaways bungalow). This South Jersey girl is exquisitely self-educated, a voracious and retentive reader and Declaration of Independence buff, whose only vice may be her book habit, and her penchant, sometimes tedious, for flogging the work of those in her personal literary canon: those bad boys, Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud and William Burroughs.

In person, Ms. Smith is plain-spoken, at once precise and discursive, as her audiences well know. But she is impatient with conversational foreplay. “Where is this going?” she said to a reporter’s question about what was important to her when she put her house back together.

As a writer, she is more oblique. The looping, dreamlike style of “M Train” can be confounding, particularly after the heartbreaking directness of “Just Kids.” It may be that Ms. Smith chooses to render her adult life in fragments and dreams for the very responsible reason that she has two children. It matters that their father be sketched as a romantic hero. Perhaps he was. It may be that she is holding back on the sort of day-to-day detail laid out by other maternal confessionals so as to spare her children any queasy embarrassment.

Ms. Smith’s daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, a composer, musician and activist, is now 28; Jackson Frederick Smith, a musician with a son of his own, is 33. (Yes, Patti Smith is a grandmother.) It’s hard to know more because Ms. Smith, whose deeply personal writing and folksy diction — she favors gerunds without their g’s — lures you into thinking she might be just as candid in person, can be sternly irascible.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” she said sharply when a reporter asked if she was still single. But memoirists open these doors. Ms. Smith had done so in her own book, having written about having no valentine of her own on Valentine’s Day. It’s a lovely, vivid passage: She’s fallen asleep reading in bed; when she wakes, her glasses, smudged with fingerprints, are tangled in the sheets along with a battered paperback copy of “The Laughing Policeman,” the fourth book in the ’60s-era Swedish detective series, and when she dresses, she chooses one of her late husband’s well-worn flannel shirts, “washed into weightlessness.” She quickly tumbles into a typical “M Train” reverie about Ludwig Wittgenstein. There is connective tissue, and the riff does make sense, but at first you groan, for her dropping a lugubrious Austrian philosopher into the middle of a scene that derives its power from the quotidian. Then Ms. Smith wins you back. “Or maybe Wittgenstein could be my valentine,” she writes. “We could live in a little red house in cantankerous silence on the side of a mountain in Norway.”

It also may be that Ms. Smith had no interest in hewing to the form of a traditional memoir because she’d already done that, to startling effect, with “Just Kids.”

Noting the shardlike, elliptical structure of “M Train,” David Remnick, the editor in chief of The New Yorker, said: “What knocks me out about Patti Smith is that she just keeps growing, changing, becoming more interesting all the time and adding new arrows to her quiver. Yes, she’s written poetry and published books along the way, but to come along and write a memoir like ‘Just Kids,’ with that kind of self-possession and structural facility, it’s as if she’d been writing fine books of prose all her life. Now, she’s clearly very restless as a writer and wants to do something else. She didn’t just write ‘Just Kids, Part Two’.”

One of the nicest things about Patti Smith, the author, is her readiness to display the foggy tedium of the creative process, and also its profound loneliness. Whether or not Ms. Smith is single, as a writer she must go it alone. And as a writer still making peace with devastating loss, it is a given that whatever she’s writing is haunted by ghosts.

So, she puts it off; she naps; she makes lists; she binge-watches detective series: “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” the BBC’s “Wallander” and “The Killing” (the American, not the Danish, version). Meanwhile, her cat throws up on her pillow. Her clothing betrays her; her pockets are torn. Her shoelaces come undone and trail in rain puddles. Her socks get tangled in her jeans, and escape at inopportune moments. Walking through Washington Square, a lone sock breaks free from her pants (stuck there from the night before), and a giggling teenager returns it to her. Small losses echo the larger ones: She is undone when a woman commandeers “her” regular table in her favorite neighborhood cafe, retreating to the bathroom and wishing upon the interloper a spectacularly gruesome death, like a victim in one of her beloved crime dramas.

When the cafe closes, its owner gave Ms. Smith that table and chairs. These and other totems are in the bungalow, like an aluminum chair from the set of “Criminal Intent,” signed by Vincent D’Onofrio. There are a few art books, Dash Snow and Piero Della Francesca; a photograph of Brancusi in his studio. A Chinese rug rescued from her townhouse on the edge of Greenwich Village, where she has lived since the late ’90s, because the cats were urinating on it. A Mad Hatter doll, as portrayed by her friend Johnny Depp (who played on her last album, “Banga”) and given to her by him. It is a place, she said, to read, to write, to draw. Given the complexities of her schedule, she comes when she can.

“I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did,” she said. “I’d like to write something as great as ‘Pinocchio’ or ‘Little Women.’ I won’t say ‘Moby-Dick’ because that’s impossible. I’d like to write a book that everybody loves. I’d like to take a picture that someone wants to put above their desk so they can look at it while they’re writing a letter or doing whatever they’re doing while sitting at their desk. I’d like to do a painting that would astonish people.”

But books are her deepest love, and writing them is clearly her keenest ambition. When she received her advance from Knopf, the publisher of “M Train,” she bought a bronze statue of a young boy who has caught a bird in his hands; she set it in her tangled front yard here.

“It was my dream to be with Knopf since I was 20,” she said. “I wanted to have something solid to mark that. I bought him because he reminded me of Peter Pan.”

Ms. Smith manages to be both kindly and forthcoming while hewing to a strict program. You admire her discipline, even as it curtails. After an hour’s talk, her young book publicist stood up, and Ms. Smith did, too. She brandished a CD of the soundtrack to “The Draughtman’s Contract,” the early ’80s Peter Greenaway film, and then played a jolly-sounding, orchestral track from it.

“It’s the theme music to my house,” she said. “I don’t know why. I always say hello to the house by putting it on. And I’m putting it on now because it’s a good way to end our conversation.”