Just Kids

By: Patti Smith

Narrated by: Patti Smith

Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

National Book Award, Nonfiction, 2010

It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.

Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to 42nd Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous - the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.

Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late 60s and 70s and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.

©2010 Patti Smith (P)2011 Patti Smith

Critic reviews

“Smith’s beautifully crafted love letter to her friend Robert Mapplethorpe functions as a memento mori of a relationship fueled by passion for art and writing. Her elegant eulogy lays bare the chaos and the creativity so embedded in that earlier time and in Mapplethorpe’s life and work.” ( Publishers Weekly, Top Ten Books of the Year)

“The most enchantingly evocative memoir of funky-but-chic New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s that any alumnus has yet committed to print.” (Janet Maslin's top 10 books of 2010, New York Times)

“Reading rocker Smith’s account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it’s hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding.” ( People, Top 10 Books of 2010)

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.

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!

Any additional comments?

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

Any additional comments?

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.

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Good Kid

Any additional comments?

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.

Beautiful

What about Patti Smith’s performance did you like?

Patti Smith's performance matches her poetic telling of her very personal story. I never appreciated her more than I do now having just finished Just Kids.

One of my all time favorites

I'm just simply in love with this beautiful book.

Thank you so much, Patti Smith ❤️

interesting life story

Narrator was passionate in telling her story. The book has a good note of humor.

A love story about friends, art, and literature.

If you could sum up Just Kids in three words, what would they be?

Love, friendships, culture,and success.

What did you like best about this story?

The growth of Robert and Patti's friendship/love story in the 60s,in NYC.

Any additional comments?

There were so many interesting people that shaped their journey.

Inspiring, riveting cannot quit!

Where does Just Kids rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This is the best audio book I have ever listened to. I listen to a lot...I want to purchase the actual book, and reread some of the passages and peruse the photos.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Patti Smith's vulnerability, intelligence and honesty make everything she writes about fascinating, tangible and tantalizing. She is the sort of person with whom you would love to have a coffee, see a film, sleep in the park. She is a treasure and a joy.

What about Patti Smith’s performance did you like?

Her poignant honesty.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Just kids...just real...just stranger than fiction.

Any additional comments?

This is an amazing story...so real and so true.