Just Kids Review

Title: Just Kids
Author: Patti Smith
Publisher: Ecco

Blurb: In Just Kids, Patti Smith's first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work--from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry. 

Me: The most stunning, inspiring, sincere memoir I've read.

From someone who devoted her life to art to me, an aspiring artist, this book was incredible. I can't tell if the time period was truly magical or if the way Smith writes paints it that way, but the world she describes is so young and alive and hopeful. From the first meeting between her and Robert to their days at the Chelsea Hotel, from shooting the cover for Patti Smith's Horses to the last goodbye, every moment is tinged with such a delicate beauty.

I think that's the magic of this book - Smith's language is so readable yet so stunning. It portrays the temporal, almost ethereal yet also completely grounded sense of what it feels like to believe wholeheartedly in art. This book is sometimes called a love story between Robert and Patti, and while I think there's certain credibility to that, Smith also seems to say herself that it's a love story between art and artists. 

The story arc and plot, despite being real, fit in perfectly to keep the reader invested in both these relationships - the human one, and the artistic one. We get to see the irony that Robert and Patti seem to have been the happiest when they were unknown, financially struggling, yet creating to no end. We see their relationship change, fall out, and come together over time as their successes also carry them in different directions. Patti's relationship with her art changes as well, experimenting across different mediums and working with different partners. 

I fell in love with Patti and Robert. Their relationship was one of a love that I'd imagine many people only dream of once in a lifetime. It's so rare to see anyone devote their life to anything, especially art. But I think what Patti Smith understands is that art is worth devoting a life to. Perhaps true art is unattainable, but the search for it will bring a vitality to existence like no other.

I almost wished I was alive back then, when everything wasn't so fast and furious and connected, but I've always thought pining for a past I don't know isn't a safe game to play. Instead, I'm keeping this book to come back to for the rest of my life, hopefully the rest of my writing career, so that I can bring some of Robert and Patti's faith and energy into my own world. There is something so inspiring and universal about sincere passion, and I don't think anyone embodied that better than them. 

"I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it."

Rating: 5 kisses!