just kids

can't recommend this book enough

I don’t need to write a review of this book.  It has already gained high praise from many critics including winning the national book award for nonfiction.  That said, I was surprised by just how incredible the book was, and so I wanted to share it with you in hopes that you’ll come to enjoy its magnificence too.

I know that a book is truly exceptional when I read the end and ignoring all my instincts as a writer, I wish that there were another three hundred pages.  I just was not ready to leave the world of this book.

Just Kids is musician/poet/artist Patti Smith’s tale of her life with controversial artist/photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from the late 1960’s through the 70’s and into the 80’s ending with Roberts death from AIDS in 1989.

Smith begins the book with a brief account of her early life and then like a spider begins to spin an incredible web as she recounts meeting, becoming lovers and best friends with Mapplethorpe.  Her web extends from Brooklyn to the Village and includes the Chelsea Hotel, Max’s: Kansas City, and CBGB’s.  She ensnares and extracts stories of her various encounters; her relationship with Sam Shepard, Allan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Robert Mappelthorpe’s eventual partner Sam Waggstaff.

Her experience as a poet allows her to manipulate language and summon up horrifying, beautiful, and romantic images.  She has an innate ability to let her voice in the book grow from that of a naive twenty year old struggling to find work and places to spend the night in New York.  Then into an experienced mother of two lovingly describing the final time a very ill Mapelthorpe photographed her as she held her newly born daughter Jesse.

The book is uniquely her voice, I could easily hear her speaking it as I read.  While you should despise her as a name dropping pretentious artist, but instead you fall in love with her as she very honestly tells the story.

I usually expect the authors of these books to paint a more flattering picture of themselves, however Smith seemed not to censor herself exposing honest feelings that surprised me. I expected Smith to be an unabashed supporter of Mappelthorpe’s more controversial pictures, instead she freely admits that much of his work challenged her and sometimes found them difficult to understand.

Occasionally in telling the story she would arrive at a period where events were fuzzy and incomplete, she would piece them together brilliantly using small nostalgic vignettes.

The book ends with a mystic meditation on life and death as it becomes a love letter for her and Robert Mapplethorpe, New York city, and an incredible time in America full of good, bad, evil and almost indescribable beauty.

This book was recommended to me by Jaime who read and fell in love with it first.  One selfish evening in LA last year I denied her the opportunity to see Patti Smith at Skylight books and tried to make up for that with a signed first edition copy for Christmas.  I now recommend this book to you, I guaranty you won’t be disappointed. 
posted by: brian snider