Book of the week: Just Kids by Patti Smith

Just Kids tells how Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met in 1967 New York, became lovers, and willed each other from obscurity and poverty to global acclaim.

(Ecco, $27)

At 63, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Patti Smith worries that she hasn’t yet created anything of true greatness, said Vanessa Grigoriadis in New York. But the first book of prose from the woman who “married poetry to the punk movement” promises to be an instant “classic.” Just Kids is written in a simple, “shockingly beautiful” style, and the story itself is timeless. Essentially it’s a “romance about becoming an artist in the city”—in this case, the true tale of how a poetry-mad South Jersey girl and an aspiring painter named Robert Mapplethorpe met in 1967 New York, became lovers, and willed each other from obscurity and poverty to global acclaim.

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Smith’s influence on music can’t be doubted, said Clive Davis in Vanity Fair. Those of us lucky enough to have seen her onstage at CBGB in 1975 know that no woman before her “combined poetry and performance in such a visceral way.” She’s “one of the few artists who really did create modern rock as we know it.” That makes the innocence of her early New York days all the more striking, said Raven Snook in Time Out New York. In a book “chock-full of amazing anecdotes” about such figures as Andy Warhol, Jimi Hendrix, and William Burroughs, it’s touching to find that the scene also depended on the likes of Mapplethorpe and Smith—two “incredibly creative and naïve geeks.”