Talk to Just Kids like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Just Kids is Patti Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir of her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from their first meeting in New York in 1967 through their years of shared poverty, artistic development, and eventual celebrity, to Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS in 1989. It is one of the finest memoirs about the making of an artist — about the specific conditions under which serious work begins to be possible — and it is also a love story, though not a conventional one.
Smith arrived in New York at nineteen from South Jersey with almost no money and a certainty that she was meant to do something, though she did not yet know what. She met Mapplethorpe almost immediately; they became lovers, then best friends, then eventually artistic collaborators and mutual muses even after their romantic relationship ended. The book's early chapters are about survival — the mechanics of eating when broke, of finding rooms and being evicted, of the Chelsea Hotel, which Smith and Mapplethorpe eventually moved into and which was then a genuine artists' community.
What it gets right
- 1.
Artistic partnership is formative in ways that romantic partnership often is not. Smith and Mapplethorpe pushed each other toward their best work, and the memoir is partly an argument for the importance of that kind of mutual witness.
- 2.
Poverty does not prevent art, but it shapes it. Smith and Mapplethorpe's early work was constrained and enabled by material scarcity in specific ways the memoir traces.
- 3.
The Chelsea Hotel in the late 1960s and 1970s was a genuine artistic community — not a myth, but a real place where serious people worked in proximity and mutual influence.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Patti Smith was born in Chicago in 1946 and grew up in South Jersey. She moved to New York City in 1967 and became one of the central figures in the punk and new wave movements of the 1970s, developing a poetic-rock style that drew on French symbolist poetry, rock and roll, and the Beat tradition. Her album Horses (1975) is considered one of the most influential debut albums in rock history. She has published numerous collections of poetry and prose, received the Polar Music Prize and the National Book Award for Just Kids, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
