Book Review: Patti Smith’s Just Kids
On the cover of Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids is a photo of artists Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe on Coney Island. Mapplethorpe with his arm around Smith, his hat at a rakish angle while she squints into the camera. A smile close to a smirk plays over Mapplethorpe’s mouth as Smith’s hair sticks to her lips, pressed close. Here, we are introduced to the lovers’ dynamic. Mapplethorpe urging Smith on, offering an arm, present if her confidence wavers. Smith sturdy, swathed in white, save for a black headband, as Mapplethorpe’s pillar. The chaos of Coney Island as their background, passing bodies blurred, a snippet of a sandwich sign visible behind the pair that reads Hero.
Smith’s story of her rise to fame as a poet and a rock star is inexplicably intertwined with Mapplethorpe’s development as a photographer. The book opens with the last day of Mapplethorpe’s life from Smith’s point of view, the final phone call between the two and the morning after that call. We learn here that Smith is married with children, and not to Mapplethorpe. This lays the groundwork for an unconventional love story that lasted throughout the pair’s lifetimes – though not in the way most experience.
Patti details her upbringing with nostalgia, peppering the narrative with stories of her siblings. She moves swiftly from her childhood to briefly traverse through her teenage years, then to her journey to New York City from her childhood home in suburban Pennsylvania. This is where she meets Robert Mapplethorpe, running into him twice on the streets of New York before the two come together as a couple.
Smith’s book details their couple’s separate and collective struggles as artists in a time when the Chelsea Hotel offered rooms in exchange for trade and sexuality was fluid while condoms didn’t exist. Mapplethorpe’s sexuality and Smith’s acceptance of his choices illuminate her devoted love to a man who lived a lifestyle completely outside her own. Smith’s dreamy cadence throughout the book works well when she reflects on the kismet of meeting certain artists, musicians and writers. However, it struck this reader as almost disconnected as she described the gonorrhea infections Mapplethorpe and Smith endured as a result of his chosen lifestyle. I experienced this same feeling when Smith depicted Mapplethorpe’s losing battle to the AIDS virus. She creates a myth around their shared life – which works successfully in some walks, but fails in others. It doesn’t do the reality of what Smith experienced in her relationship with Mapplethorpe justice.
Just Kids is a memoir worthy of being a memoir. Patti Smith’s imagination, devotion and talent are apparent on almost every page of this book – be it in her reflections of her experience, or the snippets of her art she includes in the book. The photographs, intermittently included, are chosen wisely – most taken by Mapplethorpe, they create a haunted feel in the pages.
Patti Smith’s New York Times Best Seller offers an aching view of a time past that fills this reader with regret for having missed such a time. At least we are fortunate enough for Smith’s efforts to capture her experiences in Just Kids.
