Just Kids: An Autobiography

Patti Smith forged a formidable reputation from her performance on stage + in front of the camera whenever she gave interviews. But behind the Rebel Yell lay a person of incredible warmth , good humour + generosity of spirit. As she grows up in the counter-culture we hear all about her adventures , encounters + formative influences. Rock fans will love her memories of chatting with Jimi Hendrix just days before his death or the night she spent consoling Janis Joplin when yet another man let her down. If you adore the beatnick writers then you'll be intrigued to learn one of them once mistook her for a pretty boy + tried to pick her up ! But if Just Kids has anything to teach us it is surely that Love comes in many different forms. And at that time the Love of her young Life was Robert Mapplethorpe. Only later did she discover he was homosexual + quite willing to sell his body to men for sex. But he then developed an interest in Bondage + Sadomasochism which he maintained was entirely artistic but poor Patti had her doubts. Yet the bond ( ! ) between them remained as strong as ever. Their Love had undergone a strange alchemical change : now they were like brother + sister . Even when Robert was dying from AIDS an older , more mature + now married Patti was still by his side. She'd had her first child with Fred Sonic Smith + her second was on its way...living within her as Robert lay dying... As Patti so beautifully puts it : We were as Hansel + Gretel + we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations + witches + demons we never dreamed of + there was splendour we only partially imagined. No one could speak for these 2 young people nor tell any truths of their days + nights together. Only Robert + I could tell it. And , having gone , he left the task to me ...

Really beautiful and touching book, which greatly exceeded my expectations. This isn't a book about Patti Smith, or her music, nor even about Robert Mapplethorpe, though obviously there's plenty about them and their work between these covers. It's a book about their relationship as artists and lovers as an entity in its own right, and as such it's one of the finest love stories you will ever read - a mostly platonic story for sure, but no less powerful for all that. You put the book down feeling that he was surely her 'other half', and she his - that they made one another whole, as people as well as artists. The writing is never sentimental, even when it's dealing with Robert's untimely end - it's crisp and hard-edged, but never prosaic, and the more powerful for it. Her recollections of tough times in New York around the turn of the 70s and growing up in places like the Chelsea Hotel and CBGBs before they became tourist destinations are captured with an artist's clear eye and are a valuable addition in themselves to other memoirs of those times. But it's the story of Robert and Patti that rightly dominates. A very moving, life-affirming memoir, and highly recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in their work and those times.

"Just Kids" is an enjoyable enough read, but the book feels slightly unfinished to me. It is divided up in five chapters - the childhoods of Patti and Robert, the early years, the time at the Chelsea, the time after the Chelsea and the last years. The emphasis is on the time at the Chelsea and overly so, I feel, especially with what feels like a biiit too much of name dropping going on... (I mean, yes, there were a lot of well-known and famous people around, but do we really have to know them all?) I would personally have liked to read a lot more about both the early and the last years. That said, "Just Kids" is a good read and even more so because of the just beautiful (!!!) photographs that are spread throughout the book.

I found this a compelling insight into the complex, close and highly (artistically and emotionally, if not always financially) supportive relationship between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. I'm not familiar with the work of RM and have come to the book as a fan of the author's music, and whilst music and some of its icons of the late 60s to mid 70s do get a mention (Jimi, The Doors, Janis, Tim Buckley) it is not a book about music. Rather, the central story concerns the artistic paths taken by two driven individuals. You get the impression neither could have achieved what they did without the other, and because I know nothing about the work of RM I have accepted the praise heaped on it by the author (other reviewers clearly think otherwise). The book beautifully evokes New York with characters from many forms of the arts including painters, poets, fashion designers and musicians - as well as just the beautiful. I personally really liked the space given to Harry Smith (who lived in the Chelsea Hotel at the same time as PS and RM), who I had previously only known as the enigmatic creator of the important and highly influential collection of field recordings of American folk. Very readable, and highly recommended. .

This book was a gift to my daughter, she was really happy with it and said it was a great read.

Simply written yet eloquent, Smith has honored her friend, soulmate and fellow muse with a wonderful book about their relationship and artistic development. The New York scene for "kids" was scrappy if you arrived with no money, job or place to live. The conditions in which they survived in the early stage of their relationship, the hustling for food,sleeping in Central Park, street living at its worst, was shocking. That both Smith and Maplethorpe were able to find influential people to support and believe in them despite the crude living conditions, demonstrates how much talent they must have exhibited early on. This is not a biography of Maplethorpe, nor of Smith, but essential for understanding how each contributed to the successful artistic maturation of the other. New York in the 60's and seventies is the third subject of this book. In the hands of Smith, modestly recounted (unlike a similar book by Edmund White in which he mostly honors himself, his sex life] and his intelligence!)[City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s], one can only consider this an elegy to Maplethorpe and a gift to any reader or lover of Maplethorpe's art.

I loved reading this book probably because I was a teenager in the sixties

I was a great fan of Patti Smith in my younger days but as she has grown older she has become an example of the kind of New Age weirdness and political correctness that make my teeth grind.* So it was with some trepidation that I picked her memoirs of her time with Robert Mapplethorpe, expecting peace and love-type psychobabble. Instead, it was a well-written, disciplined account of her relationship with him and early life and mercifully free from her political opinions. She also resisted the temptation to get over-emotional about some episodes in her life, such as giving away her baby daughter when she was 19, and her description of how she and Mapplethorpe went their separate ways is refreshingly sober. Her obsession with French badboy poet Rimbaud becomes a bit tedious especially as she does not explain why he was so important to her. Nor does she give any good reason why she and Mapplethorpe chose to live in a cramped room in the Chelsea Hotel next to the room where Dylan Thomas died. The quality slips at times and name dropping abounds - Dylan (Bob, not the Welsh one), William Burroughs, Salvador Dali, Janis Joplin, Lou Reed and Alan Ginzburg** - but overall the book is low key, factual and fairly convincing. There are also incisive barbs such as her comment comparing Mapplethorpe with Andy Warhol: "I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it." It's difficult to believe she was as innocent and naïve as she makes out. Patti Smith obviously regards herself as a "writer, performer and visual artist". However, as far as I am concerned she is a rock singer and will be judged as such. I`ll never forget the impact her first album had on me when I was a student in Edinburgh in the early/mid 1970s and life was founded on rock and roll and first love. * Check out her site if you don't believe me. ** Who thought she was a boy the first time he met her.