Loved A Complete Unknown? Read Our Next Book Club Pick
Maybe my favourite part of travelling is consuming as much media and art about a place I’m about to head to beforehand. Last month, I went to New York, maybe the city in the world where this is the hardest task due to sheer density and diversity of options. I was staying in the West Village, so what better time to tick Patti Smith’s iconic Künstlerroman Just Kids off the list? It follows her early adulthood in New York, as she develops as an artist and forms a life-changing relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
What is it about?
If you pitched the story of Just Kids now, you’d probably be laughed at for steering too far into cliché. After growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in New Jersey and going through a teenage abortion, Smith boards a bus at 19, on her own and with few worldly possessions other than some art supplies, harbouring dreams of making it as an artist. Her inspirations are Bob Dylan, Rimbaud and the beatniks. She says, “I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one”. But it’s real, and the rawness Smith writes with, truly self-critical and unconcerned with cultivating a persona, makes you buy in completely.
After initially scraping by working at a bookstore, she meets Robert Mapplethorpe and creates a connection that defines both their lives personally and professionally. Interestingly, she’s open about the fact that the sort of relationship she forged with Mapplethorpe was not necessarily one of divine, serendipitous benefit – it was something she actively sought, a kindred spirit. “I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side,” she says.
The rawness Smith writes with, truly self-critical and unconcerned with cultivating a persona, makes you buy in completely.
Why you should read it
Just Kids works on two fronts, firstly as a rare insight into the mind of a pretty singular artist. Everyone knows her, but from where? She’s probably best known as a punk-rock singer, but she also counts Bob Dylan as an inspiration and one of her closest confidants, and has co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Away from music, she’s co-written a play with Sam Shepard, originally moved to London to pursue painting, is beloved as a poet, and is known for her connection to a world-renowned photographer. She’s an artist in the purest sense; the medium doesn’t really matter, it’s the way she understands the world.
But then it is as good an oral history of 60s and 70s New York as any history book could offer. It offers all the texture, rough edges and excitement without romanticising the era. At times, it’s like this era what A Moveable Feast was to 20s Paris, such is the amount of now household names she orbits, from Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Andy Warhol to Alan Ginsberg and Edie Sedgewick. Her view of art is unique, full of lines like “Poets don’t finish poems, they abandon them” and “Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply”. I love their quirkiness, the thoughts of a brain wired a certain way, compelled to create rather than seek the accolades of having created.
Just Kids is as good an oral history of 60s and 70s New York as any history book could offer
There’s regret in there, too, though, about the sacrifices they made pursuing an all-consuming relationship to their art. “We never had any children…Our work was our children,” Mapplethorpe says. As for their relationship, we see it go from mutual dedication to artistic divergence to long-distance support system to, eventually, close again before his ultimate death from AIDS at 42. Some of my favourite parts are their disagreements over the merits of some art, such as Andy Warhol. She says, “I didn’t feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.”
Verdict
Memoirs are the genre I struggle with the most, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the threshold for actually publishing one is so low at the moment is verging on the ludicrous – stroll past a Waterstones and you’ll see them from people whose only claim to fame is going viral in a TikTok, competing on the Great British Bake-Off, or being the 30th best golfer in the world at one point in their lives. Often, as well, you can feel the iron hand of the double-digit marketing and PR teams desperately trying to lure you in. But if you’re looking for something with genuine rawness, about a figure whose influence is still not matched by her fame, and that offers a genuine insight into one of New York’s most important time periods, this is for you.
