Just Kids: An Autobiography

4.5 Stars ”It was the summer Coltrane died. The summer of “Crystal Ship.” Flower children raised their empty arms and China exploded the H-bomb. Jimi Hendrix set his guitar in flames in Monterey. AM radio played “Ode to Billie Joe.” There were riots in Newark, Milwaukee, and Detroit. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, the summer of love. And in this shifting, inhospitable atmosphere, a chance encounter change the course of my life.” It was that summer when Patti Smith met Robert Mapplethorpe. Just Kids is a love story of these two young people who, against all odds, meet, fall in love, and cling to that love long after they’ve chosen other partners, other ways of life, and love. It’s a love story of the city where they fell in love, and perhaps even a bit of a love story to the art and poetry and music that was created in the course of their love story. They combined their meager possessions, but money was problematic, they barely made enough money for food – and frequently went without. Extras were out of reach. Books they had already owned were their prized possessions, as was their music limited to those albums they’d brought into this relationship. And still, they were able to enjoy some concerts just by virtue of being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right person. ”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.” There are a very few years that they were not in touch, Smith’s focused on her music career, her marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith, and Mapplethorpe focused on his art, his partner. Time passes, children come along, and when Smith is expecting a second child, they re-establish communication. ”We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined. No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And having gone, he left the task for me to tell it to you.” I knew very little about Patti Smith, I knew who she was, is, and that I’ve heard some of her songs, knew she was a musician… beyond that, nothing. So, when this book first came out, and my brother sent me a signed copy of this, along with a few other books, and I vaguely recall seeing it and wondering why he sent it to me. And then, years later, also sent me a signed copy of M Train. I was beginning to feel a little guilty. I loved this. There’s a bit of that raw energy and the grittiness of living in their early days together, the descriptions of the city, especially at night. The Romeo and Julietness of it all. Beautiful prose. Their story reminded me of one of my favourite poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ”Sonnet XXX – Love Is Not All” ”Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would.”

Top Dog Book Review: “Just Kids” by Patti Smith – This book has been sitting on my shelf for FAR too long. It is required reading for boomers born between 1945 and 1960 and anyone interested in the artistic cauldron that was New York City in the 60’s through the 80’s. It is about the long-standing relationship, friendship and devotion of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Yeah, you may think you know Patti Smith, the G-L-O-R-I-A singer with the Keith Richard haircut and the snotty attitude. But you don’t know Patti. You may think you know Robert Mapplethorpe, he of the overtly sexual and overtly homosexual and S&M photographs. But you do not know Robert. This is a tale of art and artists. This is a tale of love and dedication. You know, there are all kinds of heroes. We have military heroes, but not everyone is cut out for military heroics. We have sports heroes, but not all of us are cut out for that, either. So, the best we all can do is to do what we can. This is NOT a discussion of the relative values of who does what. It is about realizing the full potential of whatever it is that you CAN be. And some people are artists. It can be a lonely life. A life filled with self-denial. How about a life where two people living together are hungry but they have enough money for only one hot dog and they split it? Do we spend money on art supplies or on food? And for what? Commercial success is far from a certainty. An early death is far more likely. “Nobody ever taught you how to live out on the street And now you’re gonna have to get used to it.” -- Bob Dylan This is a story about love. Deep, enduring, passionate love. Mutual respect. This is a lesson about value: that gifts from the heart far out value gifts with hefty price tags. Yes, I know that a lot of people out there are saying, “I’ll take the hefty price tag.” Part of me says, “then maybe this is NOT the book for you,” and another part of me says “then this IS the book for you.” Patti Smith’s writing is beautiful and skillful. She is, after all, a poet. She states at the end that there is much more to the story, but that this is the story that she chose to tell. It is not a biography. It is a love story; a real, true to life love story. So, maybe I’m in love with love. One more thing: there are those of us who love the music of Patti Smith and there is an adequate dose of that in the book. On page 245 are two sentences about her fears about music that I wish I had written: “We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it falling into a mire of spectacle, finance and vapid technological complexity.” So, this 62 year old curmudgeon says welcome to the world of “American Idol” and “The Voice” and today’s world of performance art with its visuals and its staging and woe be to any five pimple faced teenagers who get together in a garage knowing four guitar chords and wanting to make music. Thank you Patti Smith.

Just Kids by Patti Smith is a rare little gem. To me, Patti Smith has always exuded a punk rock swagger, an only half-bridled aggression. I see her, and I see only the hard, sharp angles of her. And Robert Mapplethorpe: leather, whips, unapologetic sex acts with a peculiar defiant dignity to them. Both of them are creatures who seem to have been launched straight from the scene, fully-formed and antagonistic right from the start. But they weren't. Just Kids is a memoir by Patti Smith about her time living in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe while they were both shaking off the dull scraps of adolescence and trying to break out as artists. Strewn throughout the book are pictures of them as very young excitable artists-in-training joined at the hip. Smith's prose reads like a soft-focus fairy tale. The sections set in the Chelsea Hotel, especially, have an almost Dickensian quality to them; they read as a quaint story full of larger-than-life characters, most of whom have hearts firmly of gold. Reconciling this wistful retelling of her youth with the persona I associate with her was intriguing to say the least. And obviously I am not the only one who found the disconnect between Patti Smith's presence and her internal life jarring - there are places in the text where she discusses how those around her took her for a lesbian (she is straight), or a junkie (she seems not to have experimented with pot until she'd moved out of the Chelsea). Her prose is light and airy, and her memories sepia-tinged and wholesome, despite the fact that anyone who knows the history of that scene knows just how much death and self-immolation is happening just off screen. Patti Smith herself seems to have waltzed through it unscathed, and her writing dances along the edges of the darkness that her scene held*. Without the debauchery, the excess, the Chelsea Hotel in the 70s reads as an almost Victorian affair. The book is structured in a circle: it opens with the moment Smith hears of Mapplethorpe's death, then jumps back in time before they have met. Smith discusses her teenage pregnancy and the process of giving her child up for adoption, her failure at teacher's school, and her time on a New Jersey assembly line in a brisk and somewhat sanitized fashion; again, there seems to be in her writing a distaste for discussions of the negative, of the hard and bleak moments of her life. From there, the book jumps forward to her first meeting with Mapplethorpe, their sweet and heartfelt romance, the little poverty-stricken life they build together, and how hard they worked to evolve their relationship with each other when their life trajectories began to diverge. The book ends with a far jump into the future, back to those last few weeks of Mapplethorpe's life and ends with his inevitable death, right back where the book started. Given that the book is told from Smith's perspective, it is perhaps not surprising that her motives and desires are clear throughout, but over the course of the book Mapplethorpe becomes more and more opaque. A boy who seems simple when she first meets him grows into a man full of contradictions. The person whose viewpoints and life goals seemed to mirror hers so closely at first winds up yearning to be part of the social circles that Smith herself actively avoids. It became increasingly unsettling as I read the book. What does he get from her that keeps him around? How does he see her and their ever-changing relationship? Very little is explored here in the text, and Smith herself seems to take their relationship at face value, as a thing complete in itself with little context surrounding it. It just is for her, and her wholesale acceptance of it is so radically different from the way I, personally, live out my significant life-altering relationships that it was hard for me to understand at times what their relationship was exactly. But there is an authenticity to her writing that explains the halcyon haze through which she remembers that time of her life. That period, above anything else, was her period with Robert Mapplethorpe, for whom she had a love so total and accepting it is essentially blank, without specificities, and all the hardness of that time is drowned out in remembrance of him. Just Kids is, like most memoirs, ultimately a work that says as much or more about its author than the subject matter itself. The story there is as much in the telling as it is in the content. And it's a fascinating look into the mind of a woman who is so very different than the person I assumed her to be. It is a love letter to the late Robert Mapplethorpe, but it's a love letter to her young self, as well. I can't help but wish there had been some balance to it, some acknowledgment of the difficulties of living so poor, or of loving a man who seems to fall into and out of and into and out of love with her, or of the pain of watching her friends get consumed by drugs right in front of her, but that's not the book she wrote. It may not be a book she's able to write. I can't help but think of her as an unreliable narrator for her own life, but ultimately that's what we all are. It's hard to tell the bald truth about your own life. It might be impossible. But still, the unanswered questions nag at me. I found this book absolutely fascinating, but when it was over, it felt insubstantial. But that doesn't mean it's not worth reading. *Swimming Underground by Mary Woronov of Warhol's Factory crew is a bird's eye account of the dark addictions Patti Smith seems to prefer to keep just out of frame. I highly recommend it, too, and it works as a very interesting counterbalance to Just Kids.

Have you ever awoken from a dream and yearned to tell someone close by all the seemingly concrete details that made so much sense in unconsciousness, but upon consciousness are rendered incomprehensible, even worse, banal when spoken? Or, have you ever had to retreat midway through a story about how interesting a scene or city was to have experienced with that sad qualifying statement: "Well, I guess you had to be there," those blank stares and yawns from listeners way too much to bear? Well, I have. Patti Smith has not, at least not in the case of her exquisite new memoir, "Just Kids". The difference between me and her is that my attempts to transcend mere description when writing about my past always deflates either into senseless name dropping or banal "my summer vacation essay" style explorations, whereas Smith, in "Just Kids," transcends all the pitfalls of the memoir genre and tells a poignant tale of two struggling artists in the late 60s - 70s in New York City--her and Robert Mapplethorpe--without sounding pompous, pretentious or boring. It's always the inexplicable that's most interesting. If you strip away what's ineffable about the spirit of a defining period of time you are left mainly with the banal: eating, sitting, hanging out, arguing, making money, paying rent, and so on. That's why memoirs are so difficult to execute and only a talented writer tempered with restraint, such as Patti Smith, can adequately do the genre any justice. As I was reading "Just Kids" I was continually struck with just how easy this book could have degenerated into a self-absorbed, indulgent tale of bohemianism and name dropping. The story itself is set up to lend itself to this sort of abuse. The fact is that Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were in New York City during an especially vibrant and exciting time for art and artists and otherwise bohemian types. The beats, rock and roll, which was still relatively new and exciting, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground: the list goes on: see, I'm name dropping; it's hard not to do! Instead, Smith uses a contemplative voice to recount her and Mapplethorpe's travails as they both went from two unknown starving artists to the great stars they later became. Where it could have been an appallingly boring story of braggadocio, such as telling the story of their ascendancy from front of the house to the "round table" at Max's Kansas City, instead is done masterfully through Smith's self-depreciation and reluctance. As much as the reader gets an insight into Robert Mapplethorpe, his personality, sexuality, and art, he still never lets the mystery of his character bleed through, certainly not a two dimensional character. In a way, he's the one holding the reader in suspense throughout the book. This demonstrates just how talented Smith was to carry this off--and how telling! for it was ultimately Smith who never completely came to an understanding of him. For instance, on numerous occasions she states her bewilderment at a finished piece of art, or his subject matter (the gay S&M underworld of New York City, e.g.) or the sudden choices he would make, for instance running off to San Francisco. The true nature of the cohesion in their relationship was not in the things Mapplethorpe did, per se, but in the transparency of the processes behind Mapplethorpe's art and life. Isn't it the processes of an artist that other artists are most drawn to? In some key ways, the two were very different. He was supremely ambitious and she was content at creating her art in obscurity, at least in the beginning. In a way, she was the grounding figure, ultimately benefiting him with some stability, whereas he was the ambitious figure ultimately benefiting her with some will to achieve. What a perfect match! They were each other's greatest champions! and it's this element that is the most important narrative thread throughout the book. Could they have done it without each other? Smith's perspective on this fascinating period in New York's art-bohemian scene is insightful. Having an avid interest in this cultural phenomenon, I especially enjoyed it. I am familiar with many of the people who fill these pages and the intimacy with which Smith tells the story brings me closer to their cultural milieu. In the end, the two (as happens so often in life) drifted apart: not out of transgression, betrayal, loss of interest, but because they were maturing and finding their own ways to carry on the art and life they dreamed of together, that they promised one another they would never abandon. She eventually moved to Detroit to marry Fred Sonic Smith of MC5 and he stayed in NYC. The last chapter describing Mapplethorpe's death and Smith's presence during it is nothing less than heart wrenching. I knew it was coming, but was not prepared for the impact his death would have on me that afternoon. This is where Smith really shines! Her tender ruminations on the dying and death of her lover and friend, her soul mate, is perfect. She adroitly straddles the line between sentimentality and description masterfully, never letting you stray too far into the sadness of it (as she did not let herself get lost in the despair of his death) while also avoiding mere description, leaving you to perhaps, say to yourself: "Ah, drag," close the book and go on about your business. This book sticks with you. As a side note: God! how I would have loved being there in New York City at this time! I grew up in North Jersey in the seventies. I was too young to have had access to NYC during most of the period discussed in this book. But, even if I did, I was unlucky to have been a philistine Jersey redneck (which is different than any other redneck, but not necessarily in a good way). I did actually go to NYC often in the late-late 70s and early 80s, but thought it was bohemian enough to walk around the West Village and hang out in Washington Square Park doing whippets until one in the morning. How sad. What a squandered opportunity! Oh well, I guess there's a reason why I went to diesel school, instead. Reading Patti Smith's book, at least, allowed me to live vicariously for awhile. I also recommend seeing Patti Smith live. She drew blood for us, literally. I will never forget her.

We had a large and enthusiastic book group meet at The LGBT Center in NYC to Smith's memoir of punk NYC and her long but tragic relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Everyone either liked the book or loved it. I think we actually have better discussions when there's some minor disagreement, but this was a very pleasant and, for many of us, a rather nostalgic evening. There were a few comments that Patti's style of writing was simple and repetitive at times, which could be distracting. We all agreed that the writing was tender and sweet, wistful in its poetry, especially considering that it covers some difficult times for Patti and Robert Mapplethorpe and the punk period in general. It's all very down to earth and human. "Just Kids" is a perfect period piece. It describes a specific scene from the inside and gives some minor insights into the places and characters that dominated the art and music communities at the time. The connection between Patti and Robert was strong, and their mutual connection to the art and music world was equally strong. Patti admired the worlds of Mickey Spillane, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jean Genet, but it was Robert who lived the adventure. It was not the most positive or endearing portrait of Robert, but was ultimately very moving. Robert was a striver and wanted to be rich and famous. It almost seems like Patti gently fell into her role as a poet and musician; "Just Kids" doesn't describe her struggle, just that she knew that she was going to be an artist - and eventually was. For those of us who have lived in NYC for a while, and especially those of us who lived (or visited) NYC during that period, a map would be an interesting addition to the book. Many of the places that Patti describes are very close together. In addition to this being a punk memoir, it's also often a neighborhood memoir. I think that if there was one point of contention about "Just Kids," it was Patti's reluctance to discuss sex. She was screwing Robert Mapplethorpe at the beginning and much of his photography was very sexually explicit, so it seems a bit old fashioned or puritanical that Patti would avoid it so strenuously. Both she and Robert were Catholics, but they took very different approaches to it in their artistic development. Ultimately, "Just Kids" - as the title suggests - is a story about how two artists lost their childhood innocent sense of wonder and turned into famous artists, and finally how Robert lost his life and Patti lost her friend.

I don't want to knock down this book, it is definitely a worthwhile read, but I did have some questions that surfaced as I read it. The cover photo is a good place to start...what era was she living in? I was born a couple of months before her, lived through the whole scene, also in NYC where most of her story is about. Regarding the photo, the headband, the clothes...like they were going to a costume party. Especially Mapplethorpe, his hat, clothes....what a joke. I bought out of the thrift shop too, lived on the lower east side, but I don't remember me or anyone I ever knew looking like that, like a couple of clowns. I originally bought it since I thought it would be a flashback of my time in NYC, but for the most part, it was like reading a book from someone that lived there during another era, like maybe the Beat era. Maybe it was the Warhol worshipers, I didn't run with that crowd, a whole different group of people...homosexuals and vampire types. She wrote often about Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, the '50s crowd, who were also either bisexual, or homosexual. I didn't get the feeling that they mixed with the people I knew, the freaks of the '60s. But I did enjoy her story, she's seen and lived a lot, lost a lot of her friends, and most likely is carrying a lot of pain inside of her. She deserved her success, it was a long, hard road, but she persevered. She was also very lucky too, to have avoided the HIV that killed Mapplethorpe. Her destiny was to survive, and she did.

I didn't even know who Patti Smith was. I know I got her confused with Patty Smyth. I definitely didn't know who Robert Maplethorpe was. Turns out, I did know who Patti Smith was, but I had to google "Patti Smith most popular song' and got "Because the Night" and it was all clear. The point is, this book was on my radar because I'd heard great things about the book, not because I knew who anybody was. What a tale! I'm not even sure something like this could ever happen again. It was the late '60's early '70's (my favorite time period musically, incidentally) and Patti was a literal starving artist on the streets of New York. No job, no direction, no place to live. A creative being wanting to create but not knowing how it should manifest. She meets Robert Maplethorpe and they embark on a lifelong friendship/love affair. They lived in the time and place of Jimi, Janis, and Andy Warhol. Just Kids, literally starving. It was a great adventure. Patti was lucky enough to have a couple breaks musically, and Robert not long behind her with his art. I can't say I'm a fan of either of their work. I looked at Robert's art after reading the book and thought no wonder he struggled. I thought a lot about making a living, and what artists have to do to survive. These tortured people who literally must create, have to get day jobs at bookstores. Barely scraping enough money together to share a hot dog with a friend. It's sad. Behind every Jimi there are thousands of other Jimis. Anyway, I was engrossed in this tale of friendship and life in the summer of love and beyond. The audio was read by Patti and that itself was an experience. Beautifully written passages spoken in a strong New Jersey accent. Drawing was Drawling. Piano was piana. Laughing was laughin'. Sunday was Sundee. It was a little weird at first, but ultimately gave an intimacy to the story. Her story. I couldn't put it down, and I sobbed at the end. This would be a great audio for people who don't normally do audio because if you wander off it's easy to find your way back in. Loved it!

"Just Kids" is just another Jersey-factory-girl-runs-to-New York-and-hooks-up-with-bisexual-art-pornographer-on-her-way-to-rock 'n roll-stardom story. It details Patti Smith's evolution from tentative neophyte to rock-and-roll poetess, woven through with her unique relationship to Robert Mapplethorpe, a triumphant artist whose own untimely ending, alas, makes for engaging literature. The place is lower Manhattan. The time-period is the mid-1960s and 1970s when Mapplethorpe and Smith are, age-wise, a "beat behind" the reigning princes and princesses of rock's golden age. As such, she is influenced artistically by the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Janice Joplin for whom she pens poetic cycles while absorbing political pointers from Jean-Luc Goddard's "One-Plus-One." The life-as-artist anecdotes have a familiar ring: hunger, rejection, perseverance, and a healthy amount of name dropping. Smith has affairs with Jim Carroll, Sam Sheppard and a guy from Blue Oyster Cult. Allen Ginsberg mistakes her for a pretty boy in the Automat, and Gregory Corso imparts stern advice to the budding scribe inside her. They are revealing tales that highlight Smith's achievement as survivor of an era peopled with fascinating characters demolished by addictions and carelessness. "Just Kids" is the portrait of a New York City not completely subsumed into the grid of overpriced realty, before the Internet, where artistic ambition had a geographic component and required settling into some dump on the mighty Isle. Here is "art" before its subsequent elevation to bourgeois respectability. To an artist of today's saturated market, the idea that you could install yourself at the Chelsea Hotel and initiate apprenticeships with living legends seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a no-brainer. One can only assume that, in those days, choosing art meant the painful burden of rejection from loved ones and dangerous uncertainty on the path ahead. So, as time capsule, "Just Kids" is just great. But autobiographies should tell us something we don't know about somebody. They can be intriguing when it comes to artists, because they are usually reinvented characters very mindful of their own brands, of what they show and don't show the world. And who does Patti Smith tell us who she is/was? For starters, because it's really how she got it going, Patti Smith is/was American as apple pie; thrifty, industrious, entrepreneurial, and self-involved, her Rimbaud-inspired disdain and punk rock posture notwithstanding. Here Smith describes her efforts in the opening stanzas of the couple's bohemian idyll: "I scoured secondhand stores for books to sell. I had a good eye, scouting rare children's books and signed first editions for a few dollars and reselling them for much more. The turnover on a pristine copy of 'Love and Mr. Lewisham' inscribed by H.G. Wells covered rent and subway fares for a week." And she is a fashionista of the first rank. Long before Patti Smith was confident enough to confront an imposing poetry world, she parsed a personal vocabulary in clothing ensembles that, 30 years on, she remembers down to the last accessory. In this passage she describes a successful attempt at sartorially seducing Television guitar-star Tom Verlaine to work with her band: "I dressed in a manner that I thought a boy from Delaware would understand: black ballet flaps, pink shantung capris, my kelly green silk raincoat, and a violet parasol, and entered Cinemabilia where he worked part time." And she is materialistic. Not flat-screen TV materialistic, for sure, but tightly tied to and moved by objects tactile and tangible. Before joining Mapplethorpe for a photography shoot she, "laid a cloth on the floor, placing the fragile white dress Robert had given me, my white ballet shoes, Indian ankle bells, silk ribbons, and the family Bible, and tied it all in a bundle." During the shoot she is stricken with anxiety that is eased by Mapplethorpe's knowing voice and a change into dungarees, boots, an old black sweatshirt. Smith interprets this evolution as an expression of certain ideas she and the photographer have discussed prior. Ideas about the artist seeking contact with the gods, but returning to the world for the purpose of making things. Her conclusion to the section does not surprise: "I left Mephistopheles, the angels, and the remnants of our hand-made world, saying, 'I choose Earth.'" As for Mapplethorpe, especially if you're a foot soldier in the art world, he seems a rather common phenomenon: ambitious and single-minded in his craving for fame. Patti's lazy percolation into what she would ultimately become makes for an infinitely more interesting yarn. One gets the feeling he might agree. In one of the most charming parts of the book he tells her through a cloud of cigarette smoke, "Patti, you got famous before me." She dubs Mapplethorpe her "knight," but this reader cared thanks to the love she invested in him. Mapplethorpe, of course, was an artist and all the writing about art in the world cannot replace the actual experience of it. Perhaps he is shortchanged by the autobiographical form; try as his muse does to honor him. Although we rarely accuse anybody of being too old to rock 'n roll anymore, writing remains a mature person's game. So it was Smith's good fortune to be a writer first, a musician later, and a writer now, because she brings lit-passion and a high level of skill to "Just Kids." This is especially true towards the end of the book. In earlier stanzas she is more a chronicler of the famous and idiosyncratic characters surrounding. When the poetess describes the artistic vision, purpose, and goals upon which she ultimately settles, the narrative assumes the force of that direction: "We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it was losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone." Pretty grandiose stuff. But she is, in "Just Kids," nothing if not a dramatist scripting the play of her own life, decorating it with universal symbols, inserting Patti Smith into art history's larger arc. There are persons and outlets, many in the cultural current Smith helped generate, who find such self-positioning both cloying and pretentious. Not highwayscribery. Worms squirm in the mud and we are all welcome to join them. Walking with the deities is the tougher task and should be worthy of our admiration.

Me llegó mal cortado, eso no es un problema para mí, y fuera de eso es un buen libro

Patti smiths writting is quite different from what you would expect after having listened to her music for so long. You can notice she doesnt tell the stories in detail and has her privacy in mind but this, for me, leaves the impression that what IS being said is genuine. I am not sure if she has a ghost writer, but I dont really think so. Love the frank, almost innocent, manner in which the book has been written thus far, I am almost 2/3rd into it. The seller! The book did not arive by the time it should have, but the shop sent another, then both of them arrived at the same time, and the seller gave me the option of a refund or a big discount for late delivery etc. A great shop, to be fair. Sent the extra book back and refused the discount, Patti would be might proud.

Un libro stupendo, una scrittura super piacevole. Lo leggerei mille volte.

Really beautiful and touching book, which greatly exceeded my expectations. This isn't a book about Patti Smith, or her music, nor even about Robert Mapplethorpe, though obviously there's plenty about them and their work between these covers. It's a book about their relationship as artists and lovers as an entity in its own right, and as such it's one of the finest love stories you will ever read - a mostly platonic story for sure, but no less powerful for all that. You put the book down feeling that he was surely her 'other half', and she his - that they made one another whole, as people as well as artists. The writing is never sentimental, even when it's dealing with Robert's untimely end - it's crisp and hard-edged, but never prosaic, and the more powerful for it. Her recollections of tough times in New York around the turn of the 70s and growing up in places like the Chelsea Hotel and CBGBs before they became tourist destinations are captured with an artist's clear eye and are a valuable addition in themselves to other memoirs of those times. But it's the story of Robert and Patti that rightly dominates. A very moving, life-affirming memoir, and highly recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in their work and those times.

eu estou amando ler o livro, e o livro chegou no prazo certo. parabéns pelo desempenho