‘We have to fight for what is right’: Patti Smith on gender, Sally Rooney and Cop26

In the run-up to the climate conference, the rock’n’roll poet reflects – with a little help from her daughter – on a life spent breaking barriers, hanging out with Dylan and learning to Instagram

More than two decades ago, Patti Smith and a group of other artists were sitting with the Dalai Lama when the late Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys asked the Tibetan spiritual leader a question: what’s the number-one thing that young people can do to make a better world? Without missing a beat, the Dalai Lama replied: “Look after the environment.”

“I thought it was so beautiful,” Smith says in her trademark New York drawl. “That was his number-one preoccupation. Not to free Tibet, but to take in hand a global concern that was going to affect us all, on a scale we haven’t seen before.”

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Patti Smith: ‘I feel the unrest of the world in the pit of my stomach’

The rock star and poet on solitude, her lifelong friend Sam Shepard, and writing her latest memoir

Patti Smith, rock star, poet, visual artist and writer, won the 2010 National book award with her memoir Just Kids. The Year of the Monkey, her moving postscript – about loss, serendipity, friendship and hope – is out now in paperback (Bloomsbury).

Did you plan The Year of the Monkey or did it almost write itself?
Truthfully, I had no goal. It was the end of 2015. I’d had concerts at the Fillmore in San Francisco and was supposed to go on a trip with my good friend Sandy Pearlman. But he had an accident and was in a coma and I was without a plan. I don’t drive, so decided to linger to be in his proximity and, being alone, started keeping a journal. I find writing a journal is like having an imaginary friend.

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