Just Kids---Patti Smith

My rating: Five stars

I really like a good memoir, but I am always a little bit wary of the celebrity ones. I don't care to read about debauchery on a grand scale (although debauchery on a small scale is ok by me) or about how great and powerful and talented someone is...or thinks that they are. It was with a little bit of trepidation that I decided to read Patti Smith's memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Set in 1960's and 70's New York, this book is an absolute gem. Patti Smith is such a talented writer that I pretty much lost myself in the world that she was describing, and I felt just about all of the sorrows, triumphs, betrayals and reconciliations she experienced. I was dazzled by the casualness of her interaction with people who are now serious music and art legends, but also by how she very humbly acknowledges that she was simply in the right place at the right time. There is a simply amazing passage where she describes sitting in a hotel room while a young Janis Joplin tries out some new tunes on her guitar. One of those songs was a little ditty called "Me and Bobby McGee".  Did she know at the time that something magical was happening? Smith never comes right out and says that which is pretty refreshing, but she does admit that she knew her life was out of the ordinary and that she was very lucky to be in the middle of all of the radical changes taking place in both art and music.

And here is where it gets even more interesting: Patti Smith attributes all of this to her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. For Patti, her introduction into both the art and the music scene may never have been possible without Robert. She describes their meeting as a recognition of soul-mates, which is kind of corny but really turns out to be true. They meet by accident in a park in the early hours of the morning. Patti is dejected over recent heartbreak, and Robert is an ambling young man walking the New York streets in search of inspiration. Once these two get together, they are nearly inseparable for the rest of Robert's life. It is telling that Patti Smith never claims that she knew that Robert was an extraordinary talent. Instead, she describes a life lived together...just kids really...where art and poetry and music collided...where love came and went (for they were lovers once, these two)...where friendships failed and were mended. This memoir is really a love letter. Not only to Robert Mapplethorpe, but also to a New York that no longer exists. It is a love letter to innocence lost and it is a love letter to enduring friendship. Yet I think, in the end, Just Kids is a love letter to youth and to experience and to all the things that have been and also are yet to come. I just loved it.