Just Kids
Patti Smith · 2010
Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in late 1960s and 70s New York is a love story, an artist's bildungsroman, and an elegy for a bohemian world that no longer exists. Its prose is luminous. Its grief, unsentimental.
The case against
Memory has done Smith favors. Every chance meeting glows with destiny, every Chelsea Hotel cameo (Ginsberg, Joplin, Burroughs) arrives right on cue, and the squalor is lit like a votive candle. Mapplethorpe's ruthlessness and calculation soften into boyish charm. As elegy it earns its tears; as a record of the era it is a fairy tale about one.
Memoir · the Pro canon
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