Just Kids by Patti Smith
This is the story of singer Patti Smith’s and controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s struggles to get ahead in the New York art world, and of their sometime romance in the ‘60s and ‘70s when they were ‘just kids’. It’s almost impossibly bohemian and ‘arty,’ with lots of name-dropping, and discussion of French poetry, but surprisingly not pretentious. Be warned, it’s not the happiest book around — there’s a lot of drug-taking, and suicides. Their tale really is the very epitomy of suffering for one’s art! Even by the time that she arrived in New York, Smith had had a hard life. She’d given up a child for adoption at only 19. Homeless and struggling, the angelic Mapplethorpe helped her, and together they embarked on their artistic journey. It was remarkably tough. At one stage, they were living in a flat surrounded by starving and dying drug-addicts. Even on her trip to Paris with her sister, she stayed in deadbeat hotels, and contracted lice. All the while, they wor...
