Aging & Wisdom Quote by Patti Smith

A lot is smuggled into that casual "of course". Patti Smith treats identification with Jo March less like a quirky preference and more like a rite of passage for a certain kind of girl: the one who doesn’t fit the social script but can feel a life forming on the page. Jo isn’t simply a character Smith liked; she’s an early blueprint for the persona Smith would later make iconic - the artist as outsider, stubbornly self-authored.

The line "Jo being the writer and the misfit" is doing double work. It names the two traits that, in combination, give Jo her electric charge: she’s not just odd, she’s productive; not just alienated, she’s building an alternate world. For a young reader, that’s permission. Misfit stops being a diagnosis and becomes a job description. It’s also a subtle claim about lineage. Smith, often framed as punk’s poet-saint, traces her origin story to a nineteenth-century domestic novel, collapsing the distance between "high" literature, girlhood reading, and rock-and-roll mythmaking.

Context matters: Little Women is a safe, widely circulated text, which makes Jo a stealth radical. She lets rebellion travel through acceptable channels - a book handed to girls - and arrive as a private shock of recognition. Smith’s phrasing keeps it intimate and communal at once: a personal memory that still nods to a whole cohort of future artists who learned, early, that being out of step could be a kind of compass.