Book 27: Just Kids by Patti Smith

This is a classic book of the past couple of years, in that I borrowed it to read for one of my book clubs, wasn't able to attend the meeting, but still finished the book after the meeting had already happened. Patti Smith is a musician and poet I knew of, but didn't actually know the work of; this book is a memoir of her lifelong relationship and friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work I was familiar with but whose life I knew little about.

The two of them met in the late sixties in a park in New York, and spent the next five years together living in artistic poverty together, first in Brooklyn (in my old neighborhood) and then in the village at the Chelsea Hotel and then a loft space, back when loft living in New York was actually how young and mostly broke artists lived. They were romantically and sexually involved during these years, even as Mapplethorpe's awareness and understanding of his sexuality came into focus, until they each found new partners and their relationship shifted into friendship and collaboration. 

I read this right after City of Girls, and it felt in so many ways like a continuation of the New York that was explored in that book, with neighborhoods and cultures that felt familiar but also completely cut off from my own experience. Both books have key scenes and moments that take place a block or two from places I go to frequently, and yet. There has been a serendipity in the order I've read books this past month, where one seems to inform the next one. I think of Mapplethorpe as being such a quintessentially queer artist that it was almost confronting to have his life told through the perspective of a straight person, even someone who by any reckoning was as close to him as anyone else during his adult life. But it was also a really fascinating exploration of how the counterculture of that era ran in opposition to so many norms, and on a purely personal level, it reaffirmed for me how extremely poorly I would have done as a starving artist in any era. 

Grade: A