Just Kids
Patti Smith

For the first fifty pages, I wasn’t sure about this one, but then something clicked and I couldn’t put this down. By now you know that this is the story of Smith’s early adulthood and her relationship Robert Mapplethorpe. The books starts with Smith as a child in New Jersey and ends with Mapplethorpe’s death. It’s a stunning ride.

Smith’s brutal honesty, the directness of her language, the incredible nature of her early life all made for a incredible, tragic read. To think that two of the great shining lights of 1970-80s New York met at random on a Brooklyn street corner, starved together, met everyone worth meeting together and got famous together only to have one of them die far too young … its almost too cinematic. If you care about New York, or art, or music, or the strange ways love works, you really need to read this.

Recommended.