Patti Smith planning sequel to Just Kids memoir

Patti Smith

Patti Smith 

planning sequel to Just Kids memoir

Singer will focus on music and family this time, having already written about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe

Sean Michaels
Wednesday 19 December 201210.58 GMT

Patti Smith is working on a sequel to her acclaimed 2010 memoir, Just Kids. The new book will focus on a "similar time period", she has revealed, but with more of a focus on music and family.

"I just reached social security age, but I'm far from retiring," Smith told Billboard this week. Whereas Just Kids was centred on photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, "and my relationship with Robert, and wanting to be an artist", the new book "will be more, perhaps, music-based". The singer also said she wants to write about her late husband, the MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith.

"I don't have a big rock'n'roll lifestyle, a sex, drugs and rock'n'roll story to tell," Smith told Billboard. "I think I have maybe a better story. Through rock'n'roll I travelled the world, worked with my late brother and, best of all, that's how I met Fred. It changed my life in many unexpected ways, so I have my story to tell."

Smith said she has lots in the pipeline for 2013, describing it as a "year of work". In addition to the next volume of her life story, the singer is working on a mystery novel, set in London. At the time she announced that project, almost two years ago, she said she was already "68%" finished.

Smith, who is 65, also continues to tour her new album, Banga, and to promote her photography, which was compiled in a recent book. Just Kids, which won the United States' National Book Award for Nonfiction, has been hailed as one of pop music's finest memoirs. An earlier collection of autobiographical sketches,Woolgathering, was published in 1992.