Editors Reads Verdict
One of the great memoirs of the twentieth century's artistic life — a portrait of two young artists discovering themselves in a New York that no longer exists, written with the precision of poetry and the urgency of a promise kept.
What We Loved
- Smith's prose is as close to poetry as prose can get
- The portrait of 1970s New York's artistic underground is irreplaceable
- The relationship between Smith and Mapplethorpe is rendered with complete honesty
- National Book Award winner that fully deserved the recognition
Minor Drawbacks
- Readers unfamiliar with the period's cultural figures may feel lost
- The narrative covers decades quickly in its final sections
- Smith's reverence for Mapplethorpe occasionally borders on hagiography
Key Takeaways
- → Artistic development requires community — other artists, not just individual talent
- → Poverty and precarity do not diminish artistic ambition; they sometimes fuel it
- → A great friendship can be the primary relationship of a life
- → Art is not decoration but a necessary response to existence
- → AIDS devastated an entire generation of artists and the culture they were building
| Author | Patti Smith |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Ecco |
| Pages | 279 |
| Published | January 19, 2010 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir, Biography |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Art lovers; music fans; memoir readers; anyone interested in 1970s New York counterculture. |
A Promise Kept
Robert Mapplethorpe was dying of AIDS in 1989 when he asked Patti Smith to write their story. “Just Kids” is that story — a book written as an obligation, a love letter, and a memorial, finally published in 2010. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and became one of the most beloved memoirs of its era. It is the record of two young artists who arrived in New York City with nothing but ambition and gave each other the foundation they needed to become themselves.
Chelsea Hotel, 1967
Smith arrived in New York in 1967, eighteen years old and nearly penniless, with a portfolio of drawings and a backpack of books. She met Mapplethorpe, twenty-one and equally hungry, at a moment when both were on the verge of sleeping on the street. They became a couple, then best friends, then each other’s most important audience, inhabiting a series of rooms in the Chelsea Hotel that housed Janis Joplin, Arthur C. Clarke, Allen Ginsberg, and an entire ecosystem of people trying to become something.
Smith’s Prose
What makes “Just Kids” extraordinary is Smith’s prose, which has the compression and precision of the poet she is. She renders an afternoon light, a shared meal, a moment of artistic discovery with the economy of a lyric — no wasted words, every detail carrying weight. The poverty of their early years is present without self-pity; the gradual emergence of their careers is rendered without triumphalism. The voice throughout is completely her own.
The World That Was
The New York of Smith’s memory — the Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, the gallery scene of the early 1970s — no longer exists in any meaningful sense. “Just Kids” preserves it as literature, capturing the specific texture of a time and place where art and poverty and ambition coexisted in ways that seem impossible now. It is, among other things, an elegy for a city and a culture that the AIDS crisis helped destroy.
Our rating: 4.5/5 — One of the finest memoirs of the American artistic underground, written as a promise to a dying friend and delivered as a masterwork.
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