Just Kids

Just Kids by Patti Smith was the April book club read for one of my book groups.  It's not a book that I would have picked up on my own to read, but I really liked it!  Not surprisingly to me, it won the National Book Award. Again, the great thing about book groups is that they get you out of your ordinary book choices.

Just Kids is the love story of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.  If you don't know who they are, google it.  Both were amazing artists in their own rights.

In 1966, Patti became pregnant, had the baby and gave it up for adoption. In the spring of 1967, Patti was twenty years old,  had dropped out of college and was working in a textbook factory.  She decided to go to Brooklyn, New York (she was from New Jersey) and stay with some friends, hoping for find a job in a bookstore.  When she arrived, she found that her friends had moved.  But there was a young man staying there, and he led her to the brownstone where her friends had moved to.  He left her there and she found that her friends were not home.  Her friends didn't return that evening so Patti ended up spending the night on the steps of their place.  When the new day arrived she waited for her friends who still didn't return home, so eventually that day she headed back into the city, and slept in Central Park. This was the beginning of her summer in New York, sleeping wherever she could, trying to find work, roaming with other young kids living freely in the parks, etc.  It was also the summer that she met Robert Mapplethorpe.

After she and Robert met at a bookstore where Patti was working, she realized that he was the boy she had met her first day in Brooklyn when she went to her friend's place, and he took her to where they had moved. About a week later, she ran into him in a park, they talked and ended up going to his place.

"As if it were the most natural thing in the world we stayed together, not leaving each other's side save to go to work. Nothing was spoken; it was just mutually understood."

Both aspired to be artists and encouraged and helped each other with their works.

"We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed."

Patti and Robert moved to the Chelsea Hotel where they lived for several years.  There was where Patti met both writers and musicians.  It was amazing to read all of the people that she knew and spent time with, including Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter and Janis Joplin.  And so many more.  They never had much money, sometimes no money. Eventually, Patti moved into writing poetry, then writing music, then performing music.  Robert became involved with photography.  Robert began to explore his homosexuality, and Patti had other relationships, but she and Robert always loved each other. 

The book ends in 1989.  It was hard to read the last couple of chapters.  Patti and Robert's love for each other was deep and abiding.  As one reviewer wrote about this book: "A touching tale of love and devotion."