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Just Kids

JUST KIDS
 
 
Just Kids  is a memoir by Patti Smith, published on January 19, 2010.  In the book, Smith documents her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe.  Among other awards, Just Kids won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a New York Times bestseller.   (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Patti Smith has been more or less a recluse all of her professional life – the whole time I was in NY, her only performance was a poetry reading that I passed on – but she has been getting a little more prominence lately, I am delighted to see:  She interviewed Johnny Depp in the current issue of Vanity Fair magazine and has an acclaimed memoir out now called Just Kids, about her life with her late roommate, the brilliant and notorious photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
 
(January 2011)
 
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Patti Smith grew up in Chicago and is of Irish descent.  She moved to New York City in 1967 and met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; they had a tumultuous romantic relationship that was exacerbated by their poverty and Mapplethorpe’s struggles with his sexuality.  In her multiply-award-winning 2010 memoir, Just Kids about their time together, Patti Smith refers to Robert Mapplethorpe as “the artist of her love”.  His photographs of her became the album covers for the Patti Smith Group albums. 

 

(February 2014)