Just Kids
Patti Smith, 2010
A rock poet's coming-of-age in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe: cheap rooms, sacred art, and the making of two artists. A warm, lyrical drift through memory, friendship and art in a cheap-room New York, tender and nostalgic without turning sentimental.
Feels like nostalgia, tenderness and longing. About friendship, art and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy memoirs about artists, friendship and the texture of a city, told in a poet's voice. The book lingers in memory and atmosphere rather than a tidy plot, so it may ask for patience when you want a straightforward story.
Why read it
It gives you an intimate view of two young artists finding their way in New York, and of friendship as a force that shapes the work.
A page from the book
The summer history sped up and one woman wanted to stop it.
Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up. Patti Smith.Patti Smith was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007; three years later, Just Kids won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Just Kids for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy memoirs about artists, friendship and the texture of a city, told in a poet's voice. The book lingers in memory and atmosphere rather than a tidy plot, so it may ask for patience when you want a straightforward story.
- What is Just Kids like?
- A warm, lyrical drift through memory, friendship and art in a cheap-room New York, tender and nostalgic without turning sentimental. Feels like nostalgia, tenderness and longing. About friendship, art and memory.
- What should I read after Just Kids?
- If you liked Just Kids, try A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway), The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and David Copperfield (Charles Dickens).
A taste of the feed
The cost of becoming conscious of your own gift.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
A Moveable Feast · Ernest Hemingway
The eerie certainty that you have lived this exact moment before.
We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time—of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances—of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it! I never had this mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before he uttered those words.
David Copperfield · Charles Dickens
Every generation mistakes its childhood for a better world.
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.
Travels with Charley · John Steinbeck
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