Just Kids by Patti Smith

This a warm remembrance of a dead friend and inspiration, a look back at New York City in the Patti Smith describes launching herself into an artistic career in the late 1960's in New York City in great detail. She already recognised a divine succession of poets – Blake, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet and the Beats – and she wanted to join them. She was creative and liked to write, read and draw. Eventually, she became the renaissance woman of the punks, a great rock singer and composer – but before that she had to fashion her look, her personality and her verse.
And to survive. She got a job working in a bookshop, she met Robert Mapplethorpe, who was the same age and just as poor, and they took a Brooklyn apartment together and set great store by the way they dressed; both had an ­innate and highly original sense of ­personal style. And he was fiercely ­ambitious and coveted artistic success.
In her careful, sometimes painful self-sculpting, Smith had found an inspired and equally determined collaborator in Mapplethorpe.

She obviously has a great gift for ­appreciation-- from the very beginning she was alert to influences that would help her to explore and to firm up her peculiar sensibility, which was at once edgy and lyrical, both demotic and hieratic. She was more relaxed about their ability to survive; Robert was much more ­anxious about money and fame.

Her love affair with Mapplethorpe, to be sure, had its painful moments, ­especially as they were both discovering that he was gay.
Her transition to musician seems, in this account, to have been disconcertingly easy. She bought a guitar and soon knew how to play it. She turned some of her poems into songs. She put together a band – and before long she was a megastar touring the world. Mapplethorpe produced a portrait of her that undoubtedly helped to ­cement her image; with her gift for phrase-making, Patti writes: "Robert was ­concerned with how to make the ­photograph, and I with how to be the photograph." Suddenly, Robert was showing photos in galleries attended by "a ­perfect New York City mix of leather boys, drag queens, socialites, rock and roll kids and art collectors".
Like that art opening, this book brings together all the elements that made New York so exciting in the 1970s – the danger and poverty, the artistic seriousness and optimism, the sense that one was still connected to a whole history of great artists in the past. This was a small community that was carefully observed by the media; it also flourished at the moment when New York was becoming the cultural capital of the western world.