Name: Just Kids
ISBN: 9780747568766

Patti Smith

Winner of the 2010 Non-Fiction National Book Award Patti Smith's evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her extraordinary relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe

Just Kids

Zein Esber

It was if a saint had died, one who had offered up healing music yet was not permitted to heal himself. 

darby

Our lives were moving at such speed that we just kept going. 

clara

I felt instantly confined by the notion that we are born into a world where everything was mapped out by those before us. I struggled to suppress destructive impulses and worked instead on creative ones. 

Emma Hak-Kovacs

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed.

It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

🎠

We learned we wanted too much. We could only give from the perspective of who we were and what we had. Apart, we were able to see with even greater clarity that we didn’t want to be without each other.

kiana carpino 

Sarah Christine Gill

It occurred to him that nothing was going to happen. 

He adjusted a gilded frame above the mantel. He noticed the blood coursing through the veins crossing his wrist and the bright edges of his cuff. He noticed the room in planes, sirens and dogs, the walls in their pulse. He became aware that he was clenching his teeth. He noticed his own breath like the breath of a collapsing god. A terrible lucidity came over him; a stop-motion force dropping him to his knees. A string of remembrances stretched like taffy accusing faces of fellow cadets, holy water flooding the latrine, classmates passing like indifferent dogs, his father's disapproval, expulsion from ROTC, and his mother's tears, bleeding with his own loneliness the apocalypse of his world. 

We hit the street. He was hungry but he refused to eat my anchovy sandwiches, so we ended up having grits and eggs at the Pink Tea Cup. Somehow the day slipped away. It was cloudy and dark and Robert kept watching for the sun. Finally, in late afternoon, it started to clear. We crossed Washington Square just as the sky threatened to darken again. Robert became worried that we were going to mniss the light, and we ran the rest of the way to One Fifth Avenue. 

The light was already fading. He had no assistant. We never talked about what we would do, or what it would look like. He would shoot it. I would be shot. 

I had my look in mind. He had his light in mind. That is all. 

Sam's apartment was spartan, all white and nearly empty, with a tall avocado tree by the window overlooking Fifth Avenue. There was a massive prism that refracted the light, breaking it into rainbows cascad- ing on the wall across from a white radiator. Robert placed me by the triangle. His hands trembled slightly as he readied to shoot. I stood. 

The clouds kept moving back and forth. Something happened with his light meter and he became slightly agitated. He took a few shots. He abandoned the light meter. A cloud went by and the triangle disappeared. He said, "You know, I really like the whiteness of the shirt. 

Can you take the jacket off?" I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow. 

"It's back," he said. He took a few more shots. "I got it." "How do you know?" "I just know." He took twelve pictures that day. Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. “This one has the magic," he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn't live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.

Parting was always wrenching. I felt haunted by the idea that if I stayed with him he would live. […] My love for him could not save him. His love for life could not save him. 

Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake. […] The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off, too. But before I did, it occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.

For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him. 

I have lived for love, I have lived for Art. 

I was completely smitten by the book. I longed to read them all, and the things I read of produced new yearnings. 

But the urge to express myself was my strongest desire

I reflected on the fact that not matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection. 

I was a dreamy somnambulant child. I vexed my teachers with precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical, One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much was always somewhere else. 

I was never going to become anything but myself

But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have ones work caged in art’s great zoos—the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination. 

It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.

This did take me 10 months to read but it was so beautiful and genuinely changed the way I view art. Rest in peach Robert Mapplethorpe

Cate

Takes a while to get going. Then looks all set to culminate in the grand finale that is ‘Land’. And finally Patti hits you in the feels with the goodbye track. 

Frederik De Bosschere

First biography I ever read, and first biography I would recommend. Beautifully written, perfectly reflective and like a warm hug you didn’t know you need. It was sad without it being tragic- a beautiful kind of sorrow that connects people to art, life, and one another. A perfect example on love, loss, celebration and grief.

Indi

Such a beautiful life dedicated to art in all its ways. Infinite cool cat name dropping and naïveté. The whole thing somewhere between poetry and autobiography.

Sebastian Stockmarr

Willa

Augh! energetic and filled with care, impressive pacing that alternately pulled me through and demanded that I slow down. this book is making me make more art

August Stone

rereading this is such a whirl!!!! like the intense nostalgia i am feeling and also joy at rediscovering the whimsy that is patti smith’s literary world- it’s made me excited to reread all her other stuff because im remembering that what i love more than anything about her writing is the way talks about cafes and having a coffee and doughnut at the beach and i feel like im 16 again in awe at her and her words. i could ramble loads about this but ill save that for my journal

update: i defo feel different rereading this now with fresh eyes. i loved the first quarter but found most of the middle section a little tiresome. i’ll always love how patti smith writes - she weaves words in incredibly ways- but it felt more arrogant and restrictive than i remembered,  i feel like she holds back a lot and i wished there was more emotion.  

💒lara

rereading this is such a whirl!!!! like the intense nostalgia i am feeling and also joy at rediscovering the whimsy that is patti smith’s literary world- it’s made me excited to reread all her other stuff because im remembering that what i love more than anything about her writing is the way talks about cafes and having a coffee and doughnut at the beach and i feel like im 16 again in awe at her and her words. i could ramble loads about this but ill save that for my journal

update: i defo feel different rereading this now with fresh eyes. i loved the first quarter but found most of the middle section a little tiresome. i’ll always love how patti smith writes - she weaves words in incredibly ways- but it felt more arrogant and restrictive than i remembered,  i feel like she holds back a lot and i wished there was more emotion.  



Karmen 

“No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together.”


incredibly raw and personal, i couldn’t get enough of patti smith’s writing. it may take some time for me to move on from this.

moved me to tears. such a poignant writer. 

Silva

Teresa Bonifácio

This book is about love. Love between Patti and Robert. It is also about art, and the passion of making art. It's about sacrifice. This book has the capacity of transporting you to the 70's. It has the capacity of making you imagine about being Patti Smith in that time. Of meeting Robert Mapplethorpe and with him living that life. Living at the Chelsea Hotel. Meeting Janis Jopling, Sandy Pearlman, Jimi Hendrix and so more.

It was my first Patti Smith book but it won't be my last.

Maria

so tender and full of love and understanding! the writing was so vivid, i almost felt like i was there too in the new york of patti and robert and all the other artists they’ve met. im not much of a memoires reader, but this felt so much like a long conversation with a friend

ellie 💐💌⭐️

C'était l'été de la mort de Coltrane, l'été de l'amour et des émeutes, quand une rencontre fortuite à Brooklyn guida deux jeunes gens dans la vie de bohème, sur la voie de l'art. Patti Smith et Robert Mapplethorpe avaient vingt ans ; elle deviendrait poète et performeuse, il serait photographe. A cette époque d'intense créativité, les univers de la poésie, du rock and roll et du sexe s'entrechoquent. Le couple fréquente la cour d'Andy Warhol, intègre au Chelsea Hotel une communauté d'artistes et de marginaux hauts en couleur, croise Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Lou Reed... Just Kids commence comme une histoire d'amour et finit comme une élégie, brossant un inoubliable instantané du New York des années 1960-1970. Avec pudeur et émotion, Patti Smith retrace l'ascension de deux gamins inséparables qui insufflèrent à leur vie la même énergie qu'à leur art.

Just kids

Noah

Je sais pas trop ce qui m’a pris tant de temps à finir le tout dernier quart du livre. 

Il y a un moment où tu n’as pas d’autre choix que d’être emporté dans son journal à elle, page après page, jour après jour, et il y a cette relation de confidence qui se crée. Elle m’a beaucoup inspirée, on veut tous être Patti Smith d’une manière ou d’une autre. 

Mais un jour il est temps de se détacher du quotidien de Patti et d’emporter avec soi toutes les idées qui ont germées en l’accompagnant. Alors voilà, quelque part entre le 19 septembre et aujourd’hui il a été temps pour moi de me concentrer sur ma vie et de m’affairer à la traverser moi.

Isabella 

reading this transported me to their time and it felt like i was with them. however, i did not really connect to it the way i expected it to, given all the love this receives. its beautifully crafted tho

giulia

"I'm certain, as we filed down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve-year-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not."

reneé amelia 

annalyse! 

this book is the embodiment of love. i feel very heavy, but in the most flightless way.. absolutely incredible. ✦

“No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together.”

incredibly raw and personal, i couldn’t get enough of patti smith’s writing. it may take some time for me to move on from this.

“No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together.”

incredibly raw and personal, i couldn’t get enough of patti smith’s writing. it may take some time for me to move on from this.

jack

Ryan 

désirée

“Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed. I stood looking at the sky. The clouds were the colours of a Raphael. A wounded rose. I had the sensation he had painted it himself. You will see him. You will know him. You will know his hand.” this book had me slowly crying for days and days. beautiful. a real life story full of movement and inspiration. giving this to my dad next.

i LOVED this so much ❤️❤️‍🩹💔