Just Kids
by Patti Smith
Summary
Just Kids is Patti Smith's memoir of her youth with Robert Mapplethorpe, written to keep a promise she made at his deathbed, and it is one of the great books about becoming an artist, by anyone, in any era. They met in Brooklyn in the summer of 1967, two broke twenty year olds, she just off the bus from South Jersey, he a lapsed altar boy making collages, and the book follows them through the years when they were each other's whole world: sharing single rooms and dollar meals, taking turns visiting museums because they could afford one admission, moving into the Chelsea Hotel with its resident gods, Harry Smith on one floor, Janis Joplin in the bar, and slowly, by trial and devotion, finding their forms, she stumbling from drawing toward poetry and then the rock and roll that made her, he from collage toward the photography that made him famous and infamous. The love story bends but does not break when Mapplethorpe comes to terms with being gay; they remain, as the title's borrowed remark has it, just kids, bound past romance, and his camera and her face produce, among much else, the cover of Horses. Smith writes it all in prose of surprising formality, tender, exact, and wholly unbitter, closing with his death from AIDS in 1989 and the promise this book fulfills. It won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction, a bestseller that brought a rock audience to the awards, and it has become the modern classic given to every young person leaving home to make art.
Historical Context & Significance
The award in 2010 registered a shift: the memoir of downtown bohemia, written by the godmother of punk, taken up by the literary establishment without condescension. The book also fixed the memory of a vanished New York, the late 1960s and 1970s city of cheap rent and permeable art worlds that Smith's readers now tour like a lost civilization, and it restored Mapplethorpe, a decade after the culture wars over his photographs, as a person rather than a controversy. Smith continued the autobiographical project in M Train and Year of the Monkey, and a limited series adaptation announced by Showtime in 2015 has never reached the screen, but Just Kids remains the book by which she is read, the one her concert audiences carry to the signing table.