Just Kids: the National Book Award-winning memoir
£10.50£12.30 (-15%)
Winner of the 2010 Non-Fiction National Book Award
Patti Smith’s definitive memoir is an evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her extraordinary relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe
‘Sharp, elegiac and finely crafted’ Sunday Times
‘Terrifically evocative … The most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late ’60s and ’70s that any alumnus has committed to print’ New York Times
‘Render, harrowing, often hilarious’ Vogue
In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, Scribner’s Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol’s Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc. It was a heightened time politically and culturally; the art and music worlds exploding and colliding. In the midst of all this two kids made a pact to always care for one another. Scrappy, romantic, committed to making art, they prodded and provided each other with faith and confidence during the hungry years–the days of cous-cous and lettuce soup.
Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. Beautifully written, this is a profound portrait of two young artists, often hungry, sated only by art and experience. And an unforgettable portrait of New York, her rich and poor, hustlers and hellions, those who made it and those whose memory lingers near.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Paperbacks (4 Jan. 2011) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 320 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 9780747568766 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0747568766 |
| Dimensions | 12.9 x 1.95 x 19.8 cm |
by JB
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.
by Dorian Gray
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 …
by Noel Gallagher
Great book
by John Fitzpatrick
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.
by Dorian Gray
Amazing book!