Just Kids is Patti Smith’s account of her years with Robert Mapplethorpe, and also a book about devotion to a person, to a practice, and to the idea that art is less a career and more a calling. Tackling the years of invisibility that often trace an artist’s journey, it also deals with the choice to stay in a place when leaving would have been easier.
The book quietly argues that hunger, shared between two people who recognise it in each other, is often the most generative force there is. And while doing that, it invites readers into a New York scene that doesn’t exist any longer, where proxixmity to other serious people was enough to keep you going.
But to read Just Kids now is to sit with a question the culture mostly avoids:
What does it cost to take your work seriously before anyone else does?
No, not the romantic version of that question but the actual one.
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