Just Kids

Biography and memoir

First published: 2010
Print length: 290 pagesEcco, 2010

National Book Award for Nonfiction, 2010

Description

Patti Smith recounts the formative New York years she shared with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, tracing a relationship sustained by love, artistic commitment, hardship, and changing identities. As they struggle to make lives devoted to art, bookstores, Max’s Kansas City, and the Chelsea Hotel become part of a cultural map populated by fellow artists and outsiders. Smith writes from the distance of later knowledge but preserves the uncertainty of two young people trying to understand what they might become and what they owe one another. Composed to honor a promise to Mapplethorpe, the memoir is at once an account of creative apprenticeship, a portrait of a vanished New York milieu, and a reflection on how memory can keep faith with an intimate shared past.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Direct · Lyrical · Poetic

Pace

Measured

Tone

Intimate · Melancholic · Reflective · Wistful

Structure

Chronological nonfiction

Focus

Character · Relationships · Voice

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

Art and creativityIdentityLegacyLoveMemoryWork

About Patti Smith

Patti Smith is an American singer, songwriter, poet, and author whose career has consistently crossed boundaries between literature, music, and visual art. An influential figure in New York’s punk movement after the release of Horses, she brought the cadence and imagery of poetry into rock while also writing music journalism. Her books extend that fluid approach. Babel combines poems, lyrics, prose, photographs, and drawings, treating different forms as parts of one creative practice. Her memoirs are similarly hybrid: Just Kids recounts her formative New York years with Robert Mapplethorpe in direct, lyrical prose, while M Train moves associatively through travel, reading, artistic work, grief, and remembered places. In Woolgathering and The Coral Sea, memory mingles with invention, dream imagery, and prose poetry rather than settling into conventional autobiography. Across these works, Smith returns to artistic vocation, companionship, loss, and the charged meanings of places and objects. What distinguishes her writing is its continuity with her other art: intimate experience becomes material for collage, elegy, meditation, and song.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Ecco
Language: English
ISBN: 9780066211312

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