JUST KIDS
MEMOIR
ART, MUSIC & NEW YORK
PATTI SMITH
Part memoir, part portrait of a city in transition, Just Kids follows Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe as they build a life around art before either knows where it will lead. Tender, hungry and unsentimental, it captures creation before recognition.
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WHY WE RECOMMEND IT
Just Kids is not really a book about fame. It is about everything that came before it: cheap rooms, unfinished work, uncertainty and the stubborn belief that making art matters.
Patti Smith writes about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe with tenderness, but without turning their early lives into mythology. Music is present throughout, alongside poetry, photography, clothes, streets and the daily work of becoming an artist.
What makes the book endure is its attention to the years when neither Smith nor Mapplethorpe knew where their work would take them. They make things because they need to. Recognition remains somewhere beyond the horizon.
It belongs on the Glitch&Gold shelf because it captures culture while it is still being made, before careers, audiences and reputations take over.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Patti Smith arrives in New York in 1967 with little money and no established place in its artistic world. A chance meeting with Robert Mapplethorpe begins a relationship that moves between romance, friendship and creative partnership.
Together they pass through apartments, borrowed rooms and the Chelsea Hotel while finding their way into the artistic circles of late-sixties and seventies New York. Around them, music, poetry, photography and performance are beginning to collide in new ways.
Smith remembers the hunger and uncertainty alongside the excitement. The book follows two young artists learning how to take themselves seriously before the wider world does.
Just Kids begins as the story of two people trying to build a life around art and gradually becomes an elegy for a relationship, a city and a period that could not remain unchanged.
BOOK DETAILS
Author: Patti Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
First published: 2010
Paperback edition: 2011
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780747568766
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