Just Kids

By: Patti Smith

Narrated by: Patti Smith

In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work—from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.

the memoir of an innocent time, a love letter

I was a freshman at the Corcoran in 1978, Patti Smith was cool. Ten years later, I was a widow working as a lab technician in an AIDS lab, and a year later Robert Maplethorpe died. By that time, I was shell-shocked by death, homophobia and the terror of becoming single in a world of AIDS. It took me over a decade to pay off the enormous medical bills my husband left me and finding my way back to painting and writing.

At 2:30am this morning, New Year's Day 2012, in bed with my iPod, I downloaded this book and entered a time machine. Everything I assumed I knew about these two people via their mythology was wrong.

This book had a profound effect on me and yet, I wonder how it will be received by those outside the solar systems of art and AIDS in that timeframe, hopefully with an open mind. These two people whose lives in the rearview mirror are legendary. It may come as a surprise that most people in those days were so so naive and innocent. We were not drowning in the world wide web of data... growing up Catholic and confused by a world outside our limited view, all the while living on the edge...

I love this book and it will find a permanent home on my iPod. A reminder of a place and time that formed many who are now graying and even more confused.

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Good Kid

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Patti Smith gets it all wrong. Edgy rock and rollers are supposed to be narcissists and angry at the world. They’re supposed to resent their parents and childhood, and they’re supposed to see betrayal in all their relationships. They’re supposed to be heading toward some kind of nihilism, taking whatever gifts they might have along with them, consciously squandering their potential greatness behind love and self-destruction.

Instead, Smith actually likes the people she knows. She values her family and friends, and she sees a constant – if slightly moving – target in her art. She is after, always, some sense of poetry that isn’t absent from her America (because that would be easy) but is rather always present but almost over-looked. She believes there’s an audience for the difficult, and she believes there are reasons to find most people she meets interesting.

So, with that, her memoir is worth it just to get a glimpse of her. I’d class myself a B+ fan of her work. I love, very much, her “big” songs – “Because the Night,” “Frederick,” or “Dancing Barefoot,” – and I once spent a summer wearing out the grooves of one side of Horses, but I tire quickly of the more purely poetry cuts. I like some of her images, but find her work undisciplined. But never mind that; if you want a guide through the sometimes cruel, almost always too-cool-for-you world of the 1970s New York City art world, it’s hard to imagine a better guide. Certainly no one this inside it all could care as much about revealing it to the squares like us.

But, of course, the heart of this memoir – which seems to me deserving of its National Book Award – is her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a strange story, sometimes magical, since she met him on the first day she landed in Brooklyn. I knew him as the famous chronicler of the homosexual underworld of his day, and I knew he’d died of AIDS, so part of me wanted to shout at her from the start, “Don’t fall in love with him – he’s gay even if he doesn’t know it yet.”

It’s a good thing she couldn’t hear me, though, because their relationship is so beautiful. They’re two “kids” who believe in one another, two talented people on the brink of discovering their art, and they discover it in one another before each does in him or herself. They go different ways, but they never stop loving each other. Sex is a curious after-thought in all this. Smith may sleep with half a dozen people, but so what? She chronicles the way she cares about Mapplethorpe, and the way he cares about her. I find him a lot less interesting than her, but he becomes interesting to me for the way he loves her so steadily. (I listened to Smith reading the audio version, and I came to love the way she’d imitate his drawn out, semi-exasperated way of saying her name, “Patttiiii…”)

There are a lot of other fascinating things that happen to Smith along the way. She gets picked up by Allen Ginsberg who thinks she’s just a pretty boy. She has an affair with Sam Shepard and the two casually write a play to kill the time. She takes up with a young Allan Lanier, a member of the just-becoming huge Blue Oyster Cult. And she and Lenny Kaye invent a new way to play rock and roll.

But through all that, the story that ties it together is her affection for Mapplethorpe, and the lens that makes it worthwhile is her own, deeply human one. The version I read includes an appendix with some excerpts of her poetry and songs in memory of Mapplethorpe – and there are moments in all of them to admire – but nothing we see from Smith rivals the simple and beautiful story she tells throughout this memoir.

Just Beautiful

This is my first patti smith book, but not the last. Her words and voice are so beautiful. Being a fan of her music inspired listening to this book, but I feel like I didn't know anything about her till now. This book shares and creates such an amazing image of her life you can just picture it all. Just finished and just cried.

Wonderful!

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes!

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We listened to this on a road trip from Texas to California and it was absolutely perfect. So atmospheric and tender and romantic. I can't recommend it more highly.

A Beautiful Journey of Love, Art and Fame in NYC

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As an admirer more than a fan of Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe, I was continuously struck by the chance crossings, first of their lives, and then with others over years that linked so many heroes of music, art and literature. Just Kids is a beautiful book made more touching by her voice, retracing a charmed journey that seems too improbable to be true. It is a powerful love letter as well as a stark history of what NYC took and gave in ways that, for good and for bad, it no longer does.