Devotion by Patti Smith is a compact and luminous reflection on the artist’s emotional and creative landscape. Framed by her travels through France and England—visiting the publisher Gallimard, Simone Weil’s grave, and Albert Camus’s home—the memoir interweaves evocative travel diaries with a central, haunting fictional tale. In “Devotion,” a young Estonian figure skater named Eugenia navigates ambition, obsession, and freedom under the sway of an enigmatic older patron. The final section drifts back into introspection, as Smith contemplates literary influences, dreaming, and the mysterious alchemy behind writing. Her prose—spare, poetic, reverent—draws back the veil on inspiration, posing a singular question: “Why do we write? Because we cannot simply live.”
