Where to Start with Patti Smith: A Reading Guide

Patti Smith (born 1946) is an American singer, songwriter, visual artist, and poet who emerged from the New York underground arts scene in the early 1970s and became one of the founders of punk rock with her 1975 debut album Horses. Just Kids was published by Ecco Press in 2010 and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Smith had been working on the memoir for years before completing it; she has described it as the book she needed to write, a promise fulfilled to Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who died of AIDS in 1989, that she would tell the story of their early years together.

Where to Start: Just Kids (2010)

The essential Patti Smith — and one of the most beautifully written memoirs in recent American literature. Just Kids begins with Robert Mapplethorpe’s death and then moves immediately backward to 1967: Smith, twenty years old, newly arrived in New York after leaving New Jersey with no money, no plan, and the conviction — not yet evidence — that she was going to be an artist. The memoir covers the next two decades, but its heart is the first few years, when Smith and Mapplethorpe were almost entirely without resources and entirely committed to making work.

The Chelsea Hotel years are the memoir’s centre. Smith and Mapplethorpe moved into the Chelsea — then populated by artists, writers, musicians, and eccentrics at varying stages of success and ruin — and into a world that both of them were learning to understand. The memoir is full of brief portraits of the people who passed through: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, the artist Gregory Corso. Smith renders them without celebrity inflation, as people encountered in corridors and at readings and in the small hours, people who were part of the fabric of a particular time and place.

What makes Just Kids exceptional is the quality of attention Smith brings to Mapplethorpe himself. She writes about his development as an artist with the precision of someone who watched it closely over many years: his early assemblages made from found objects and magazine images; his discovery of photography as a medium; the way his eye organised a frame. She writes about his sexuality — his gradual acceptance of his attraction to men, against the background of a devout Catholic upbringing — with delicacy and without elision. And she writes about his body’s decline with the directness of someone who spent months beside a deathbed, managing the grief by continuing to look clearly.

The artistic apprenticeship narrative gives the memoir its spine. Both Smith and Mapplethorpe arrived in New York as people with potential and left their early years there as working artists with defined sensibilities and bodies of work. The memoir is honest about how this happened: through constant making, through the influence of other artists and writers, through the long education that living in close proximity to creative ambition provides, and through a kind of mutual devotion that sustained both of them through the poverty and the uncertainty. Smith does not romanticise the poverty; she describes what it was like to not eat, to sleep in bad places, to have no certainty about whether the work would ever reach anyone.

The prose style is the memoir’s most distinctive quality. Smith writes in a register that sits between lyric and plain: sentences that carry the weight of what they describe without decoration, paragraphs that build to images rather than arguments. She draws on her life as a poet without letting the book become poetic in the mannered sense. The result is a memoir that reads quickly and leaves a strong impression, not because it simplifies its material but because it trusts the material to speak without being managed.

The promise that frames the book — the commitment Smith made to Mapplethorpe as he was dying — gives Just Kids an unusual moral gravity. It is not primarily a memoir of artistic success or New York nostalgia. It is an act of witness to a specific person, a specific friendship, and a specific way of living with art as the central project of a life. Smith delivers on the promise.

Reading Patti Smith

Just Kids is Smith’s essential and most widely read book. It stands alone as a complete memoir and requires no familiarity with Smith’s music or visual art.

For the full Patti Smith bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Patti Smith author page on Editors Reads.

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