Just Kids

From Strand Bookstore

The art and music worlds would call them, but until that journey seemed more prevalent, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe promised themselves to each other. As they meandered through New York looking for their calling, they were lovers, then friends, and, as each of them burgeoned into stardom, they were supportive. Patti Smith's 'Just Kids' documents the time before Mapplethorpe became famous, the time before her music captivated the city; and the time before Mapplethorpe died so young. Smith uses the same tender, yet awkward, distinct lyricism that marks her as one of the best songwriters in modern American rock music to delineate this vivacious portrait of two young artists' ascent. B&W illus.

From the Publisher

A Commanduer de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres-winning musician and writer describes the coming-of-age story about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, from their first meeting in the early 1970s through their shared pursuits of artistic ambitions. By the author of AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE. 60,000 first printing.

Review

Eugenia Williamson - Boston Globe
"JUST KIDS, the memoir of the singer and poet Patti Smith, is a heartbreakingly sweet recollection of...[a] sort of vanished Bohemian life....Just as [Smith] stands out as an artiste in a movement based on collectivism, her singular voice gleams among rock memoirs as a work of literature."

Review

Laura Miller - Salon
"It's impossible to imagine the Patti Smith who narrates JUST KIDS boasting about her autoerotic practices. Instead, this version of Smith is circumspect to the point of demureness as she describes her adventures in the decadent carnival of New York in the 1960s and '70s. She is as innocent in her own way as I was when I bought that first copy of [Smith's 1978 album] EASTER, ferociously earnest and irresistibly moving."

Review

Carmela Ciuraru - San Francisco Chronicle
"JUST KIDS is astonishing on many levels, most notably for Smith's lapidary prose....There's no need to ghettoize this book by praising it as an impressive memoir by a famous musician. It is simply one of the best memoirs to be published in recent years: inspiring, sad, wise and beautifully written."

Review

Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly
"[T]he heart of this captivating memoir is the lifelong love affair...between Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethrope....In he inimitable, lyrical style, Smith recalls the pair's coming together as young, monumentally broke dreamers....What follows is both a poignant requiem...and a radiant celebration of life."

Review

Tom Carson - New York Times Book Review
"JUST KIDS is the most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late 60's and early 70's that any alumnus has committed to print....[T]he atmosphere, personalities and mores of the time are so astutely observed....This enchanting book is a reminder that not all youthful vainglory is silly; sometimes it's preparation."

Review

Janet Maslin - New York Times
"[A] tenderly evocative memoir....It's possible to come away from JUST KIDS with an intact image of the title's childlike kindred spirits...never wanting what they couldn't have or unduly caring what the future might bring. If it sometimes sounds like a fairy tale, it also conveys a heartbreakingly clear idea of why Ms. Smith is entitled to tell one."

More about the book

Punk rock poet Patti Smith pays tribute to a former lover and forever friend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, in this paean to their days as impoverished artists in 1970s New York. Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe recognized each other as kindred spirits during the seminal summer of 1967, and in the ensuing decade they would nurture each other's artistic instincts through constant poverty and sporadic drug use, until both began to achieve recognition in the mid- to late 1970s. Smith particularly focuses on the couple's years living in the Chelsea Hotel, where they subsisted on Smith's earnings from various bookstores while interacting with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Janis Joplin. With the same brand of ragged rhapsody which infuses her lyrics and poetry, Smith crafts a memorable elegy to her soul mate while capturing the zeitgeist of glamorous abjection which has come to define 1970s New York.