Just Kids

Patti Smith’s National Book Award–winning memoir *Just Kids* (2010) recounts her arrival in New York City in 1967 and her formative relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Broke and adrift, Smith meets Mapplethorpe in Brooklyn; the two become inseparable companions, collaborators, and romantic partners before he comes to terms with his homosexuality. Their bond endures as a platonic partnership that shapes both artists’ careers. The book’s central framework is the intertwined coming-of-age of two artists. Smith traces their shared poverty and creative awakening through addresses that map a bohemian New York: the Chelsea Hotel, where they encounter figures such as Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs; Max’s Kansas City; and the Hotel Chelsea’s storied corridors. Mapplethorpe’s early experiments include jewelry, collage, and altarpieces built from found objects, often funded by Smith’s wages from a factory job or bookstore shifts. Smith, meanwhile, moves from drawing and poetry to performance, eventually co-founding the Patti Smith Group. The narrative culminates in the 1975 release of *Horses*, recorded as Mapplethorpe was gaining recognition for his own photography; his portrait of Smith became the album’s iconic cover. Mapplethorpe dies of AIDS-related complications in 1989, and the memoir is framed as a promise Smith made to him: to tell their story. *Just Kids* is not a conventional rock autobiography but an elegy for a particular downtown scene, a meditation on friendship as artistic sustenance, and a portrait of two people who steadied each other while inventing themselves. It won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction.