‘Just Kids’ by Patti Smith
I didn’t read this so much as devour it; it is all too rare to find a book as pure and affecting as this one. Just Kids is Patti Smith’s exquisitely detailed account of her life with the fabled photographer and visual artist Robert Mapplethorpe. The book chronicles their unique relationship from their chance meeting in 1967 to his untimely death from AIDS in 1989.
It is nigh on impossible to do justice to a work that does so many things so very well, though one jacket quote courtesy of none other than Johnny Depp just about nails it: ‘Patti Smith has graced us with a poetic masterpiece, a rare and privileged invitation to unlatch a treasure chest never before breached.’
Just Kids is written in a way that is incredibly fluent and engaging, yet still in keeping with the memoir form. Particularly enchanting is Patti’s description of the mélange of free spirits roaming around New York City in the late sixties and seventies; the derelicts and the junkies, the hippies and the hustlers.
Her tales from the storied Hotel Chelsea (perhaps best known as the place where Nancy Spungen, as in Sid and Nancy, met her grisly end) are particularly compelling, the hotel’s lobby having been a who’s who of the art, literature and music spheres of the time. Smith talks extensively of seemingly cavalier exchanges between herself and those who would go on to become legends such as Allen Ginsberg and Jimi Hendrix, even Salvador Dalí makes a surprise appearance. She also describes one occasion on which Bob Dylan was watching in the audience at an early gig of hers.
But most integral to Just Kids is the depiction of the relationship between Smith and Mapplethorpe. After meeting in NYC’s Tompkins Square Park where Robert inadvertently rescues Patti from a blind date gone awry, the two kindred spirits go on to form a relationship both bulletproof and impossible to define.
The book begins as a tale of perseverance and the importance of hard work in pursuing a dream. Smith and Mapplethorpe showed immense faith in one another and the art they respectively created, and they were so irrevocably bound together that not even Robert’s latent homosexuality could alter their dynamic.
What struck me most about Just Kids, however, is the painstaking detail in which Patti recalls every little conversation and excursion. Colours, materials, shapes, weather - all of it combines to create the proverbial treasure chest that Johnny Depp was talking about.
Aside from knowing their names and occupations I knew very little about Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe before opening up Just Kids, and I have to say that now I know I would not hesitate to recommend this wonderful meditation on love, dreams and death to anybody, fan or otherwise.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in July 2011.