I absolutely loved this memoir-Just Kids by Patti Smith. It probably helps to start off as a big fan of Patti Smith or Robert Mapplethorpe, but in the end I’m not sure if that even matters. I saw Patti Smith about 20 years ago, reading her poetry and playing her songs on just an acoustic guitar with no back up. She was hypnotic. Someone in the audience behind me kept yelling “Tell us about Mapplethorpe!” and I know she heard him because it was a small club, but she never acknowledged him, which I was happy about since he was really annoying. But here, in her new book, she has done just that-tell us about Mapplethorpe and herself-when they were just kids, living in New York and finding themselves and the artists they would become.

It was an amazing time to be a young artist in New York in the late sixties and early seventies. Living in the Chelsea hotel and surrounded by people like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick, Sam Shepherd, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Bob Dylan, and many many others. For all the sex, drugs and rock and roll going on at the time, surprisingly the word that comes to my mind when I read this book was -‘innocent.’ That’s how Patti Smith seems to me. No one can believe she’s not either a junkie or a lesbian because of the way she looks and who she hangs out with. She is always hardworking, not involved in the drug and alcohol culture that brought so many of these artists down, and she and Mapplethorpe are deeply loyal to each other throughout their lives. I thought it was a beautiful and tender love story, and also an inside look at two artist’s lives, emotions and experiences-and the willingness it takes to sacrifice all for your art-meaning many hungry nights when you must choose between art supplies or food or go without altogether.

Patti Smith won the National Book Award in Non-Fiction for this book. I watched her cry when she recieved her award-a lifelong dream of hers. She has experienced the loss of so many loved ones in her lifetime, yet she continues her work. I am grateful to her and inspired by her, and thankful that she shared her story with all of us. Her writing is lyrical and poetic and full of so many small details I felt transported back to that time in New York.

For fans of Patti Smith or Robert Mapplethorpe this is a must read for sure. But even if you’re not a fan, this is a book worth reading.

Note: This is strikingly similar to the historic novel Claude & Camille-A Novel of Monet, that I read just before this book. That was set during a very creative time in Paris in the 1860’s and 70’s-a hundred years earlier, and those artists were also poor and hungry and sacrificing everything for their art. I couldn’t help but compare their similar circumstances having read them back to back. Even though they were very different times, nothing really changed for poor, unkown artists trying to make their way in the world and have their voices be heard. It is a life that takes nothing less than absolute, unwavering committment, and this doesn’t seemed to have changed in the past century.