Just Kids An Autobiography

and in 2010, she released Just Kids, a personal memoir of her early life and her time in New York City with Robert Mapplethorpe. And later that year, Just Kids won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, one of the most prestigious literary honors in the world.

So back in 2010, I picked up this book that everyone seemed to be reading that year. Just Kids by Patti Smith.

Just Kids is this memoir of Smith's early years in New York and her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

But Just Kids, the beauty of it, the reason I think it worked for so many people, won the National Book Award that year, is it's one of those rare books that makes you feel what a moment must have been like.

I've read it repeatedly. And I know a lot of people for whom that's true. And one of the reasons, I think, is that a lot of us, we sort of wish we had been there in that moment.

somebody lent me their copy of Just Kids by Patti Smith.

people were saying things in earnest around me like, you've got to read the Russians. And do you want to join our Ulysses book group?

When Terry spoke with Patti Smith in 2010 Smith had written the memoir Just Kids about growing up in New Jersey moving to New York in 1967 evolving into a poet songwriter and performer and beginning a relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

her 2010 memoir, Just Kids, is now part of the canon of essential New York stories.

I teach Patti Smith's iconic memoir, Just Kids, almost every year in my New York Lit course at Georgetown.

If Bread of Angels lacks the strong coming-to-New York plotline of Just Kids, it feels more intimate.

Did you read the Patty Smith book about what? I'm sorry. No, I'm not a fan of hers sorry. Well, it's got Mapplethorpe all through the book that's why I thought you might have.

What a work of art. What a work of art.

And then in 2010, you completed it? Is that right?

I wanted to write fiction, not nonfiction, but I had promised Robert and he asked me to write our story.

And I knew what our story was. I knew it backwards and forwards, but I wanted to present it in a way that would make him happy, that he'd be proud of.

But Robert was not a reader, so I wanted to write something that would have a cinematic feel so that readers would like, that it would be poetic enough, that readers would be fulfilled, but also non-readers could also enjoy as sort of almost like a movie.