Maureen Corrigan

There's a structural awkwardness about the way Smith leapfrogs over those early New York years, the same ones that made Just Kids such a treasure, lest she repeat herself.

But those of us who love Patti Smith don't love her because she or her art is perfect.

We love her because of her rough authenticity, poetic language, and occasional snarl.

We also love her because she forgot the words of A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall when accepting the Nobel Prize on behalf of Bob Dylan in 2016.

In that nightmare moment, Smith looked out at the august crowd and said, I apologize.

I'm sorry.

I'm so nervous.

As she did when first entering New York as a young woman, Smith trusted that if she flung herself out onto the mercy of the crowd, it would buoy her up.

I love King's writing, but the opening section was hard for me to take, not in a grisly Cormac McCarthy or scary Stephen King kind of way, but in a, ugh, I remember being that girl, that age kind of way.

Heart the Lover opens in a college class of the 1980s.

The professor, a man, is teaching 17th century British literature, and he selected a student's essay, a creative piece, to read aloud.

But first, he holds up the essay to remark on its vulgar packaging, the fact that it's typed on neon orange paper.

The embarrassed student author is a young woman nicknamed Jordan.

She tells us that Halloween construction paper was all she had available when she was typing the essay on deadline.

Here's how Jordan, decades later, will remember what follows.

There are two smart guys in the class.

They sit up front together.

The professor runs things by them so often, I assume they're his grad school TAs.

When my essay gets passed back to me, they both turn to watch where it goes.

After that day, the copper-haired one, Sam, begins migrating back.