Patti Smith

Patti Smith is an American punk poet, musician, and author whose memoir Just Kids chronicles her formative years with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in a portrait of art, poverty, and deep friendship in late-1960s New York.

Patti Smith is one of the foundational figures of American punk rock and a poet with serious literary credentials, but Just Kids, published in 2010, reached audiences well beyond her music following. The memoir begins in 1967 when Smith, 20 and newly arrived in New York with no money and no plan, meets a young Robert Mapplethorpe outside a bookstore. The book chronicles their years together — living in the Chelsea Hotel, scrabbling for artistic footing in the countercultural world of late-1960s and early-1970s Manhattan, and slowly finding their respective paths as artists — until Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS in 1989.

Smith’s prose is lyrical and precise, drawn from the sensibility of a poet rather than a memoirist interested primarily in event. She renders the material world of that New York — the textures of Chelsea Hotel rooms, specific streets, the faces of specific people — with loving attention, and her portrait of Mapplethorpe is both deeply personal and historically valuable. The book was, in part, a promise kept: she had told Mapplethorpe she would tell their story.

Just Kids is honest about poverty and struggle without self-pity, and tender about its central relationship without sentimentality. The friendship between Smith and Mapplethorpe, which evolved from romance to deep companionate love, is the book’s emotional core, and the grief that runs through the narrative — quietly, until it surfaces fully at the end — gives it lasting force. It is one of the genuinely outstanding American memoirs of the past two decades.