Smith presents art and imagination as key coping mechanisms. Through hardships like illness and poverty and the tragedies of loss, Smith returned over and over again to creative practice to find steadiness and coherence. As captured in the memoir, art is how she has lived and endured.

Smith captures the instability of human experience through an extended metaphor:

We are on this chessboard Earth. We attempt to make our moves, but at times it seems as if the great hand of a disinterested giant haphazardly sends us on a trajectory of stumbling. What do we do? We step back and seek within ourselves what is needed to be done and serve the best we can (256).

A chessboard suggests the potential for agency and strategy, yet the “disinterested giant” that intervenes with “haphazard” chaos is a force of nature, neither malevolent nor providential but indifferent. History, illness, accident, and death disrupt without intention. Smith’s response to her many setbacks—such as the deaths of her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe; her husband, Fred; her brother, Todd; and her mother—was despair that led to a turning toward the creative labor of writing, composing, and singing. Smith thus positions art as the only action still available when control is stripped away. She extends this logic through another image: “A great artist is an alchemist as well, driven to transfigure the beauty and brutality of existence” (246). There is no way to erase suffering, but it is possible to draw from it beauty that makes experiencing suffering bearable.

Imagination also allows for self-definition: “I believe in my own myths, the lines and arrows on childish charts of forgotten lands once designed by my own small hand. I believe they exist, these places, found, lost, then revisited, whose shining edges wane, then curiously return as a silken boomerang” (263). Smith’s early maps served as guidance through adult chaos, the “lines and arrows” directing the cartographer toward building identity out of her “own myths.” The image of the “silken boomerang” carries many resonances. Within it is the silkworm, spinning luxurious thread out of its own body in a metaphor for artistic creation. There is also the boomerang, a weapon that returns when thrown well enough to hit its target—a repeated gesture that signals resilience. Smith’s own perseverance surfaced in moments of greatest vulnerability; she came back to writing because the act of composition provided a means of bearing witness and transforming grief into something that could be shared.

Bread of Angels argues that imagination is not a retreat from reality but the most rigorous method of inhabiting it. Smith uses art to move through her suffering. The memoir insists that beauty and pain are both opposites and neighbors—that registering grief can render it into song. When the chessboard shifts, the artist survives by refusing to stop making meaning from what remains.