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M train
317 pages
A quiet, poetic meditation on art, loss, and the comforting rituals of daily life, best consumed with a cup of black coffee.
What it feels like
Reading this memoir feels like sitting across from a brilliant, slightly eccentric friend in a quiet corner cafe on a rainy morning. The pace is wonderfully meandering, drifting seamlessly between the present moment, anchored by black coffee and beloved books, and vivid, elegiac memories of lost loves and artistic pilgrimages. It is a deeply atmospheric and melancholic experience, yet profoundly comforting, wrapping the reader in a cozy blanket of poetic observation. The prose is lyrical and associative, elevating the mundane to the sacred. It will delight artists, writers, and anyone who cherishes the quiet ghosts of the past, offering a beautiful, wistful companion for those navigating their own landscapes of grief, creativity, and the relentless passage of time.
- Mood
- melancholic
- contemplative
- cozy
- atmospheric
- Tone
- elegiac
- reflective
- intimate
- wistful
- poetic
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- grief and memory · the creative process · solace in routine · literary pilgrimages · the passage of time
- The writing
- Lyrical, associative, and deeply observant, weaving the mundane details of daily life into profound artistic meditations.
- The arc
- Begins in the quiet solitude of a morning routine, drifts through profound landscapes of memory and loss, and settles into a gentle, enduring acceptance of life's impermanence.
- Who it's for
- Artists, dreamers, and literary souls who find comfort in solitary cafe mornings, old books, and the quiet ghosts of the past.
Content notes
- grief
- death of a spouse
- natural disaster
About the book
M Train is a journey through eighteen "stations." It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafâe where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. We then travel across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy hits, to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation, alongside signature memories including her life in Michigan with her husband, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, whose untimely death was an irremediable loss. For it is loss, as well as the consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this memoir, augmented by black-and-white Polaroids taken by Smith herself.
Description from Open Library.
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