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Just Kids

Just Kids

by Patti Smith

Ada’s Score

Patti Smith opens this memoir like a photograph slowly developing — New York in the late 1960s emerging grain by grain, raw and luminous. At its heart, Just Kids is a love story between Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, two young artists arriving broke and hungry into a city that still had room for the beautiful and the desperate. Smith's prose carries an almost devotional quality — spare, lyrical, never sentimental. She writes about poverty, ambition, and creative becoming with striking honesty. Where the book truly succeeds is in capturing art as a way of surviving. Anyone drawn to bohemian mythology, the creative life, or elegiac friendship will find this essential.

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"Smith wrote this as a promise to Robert, and you feel that weight on every page. It's grief and beauty and New York all braided together."

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When Two Artists Became Each Other's Greatest Work

Patti Smith wrote Just Kids as a promise kept to Robert Mapplethorpe on his deathbed — and you feel the weight of that vow on every luminous page. This is a book about being young and hungry and magnetic in a New York City that no longer exists, but more than that, it's about the rare kind of friendship that shapes who you become as an artist and a person. Smith's prose doesn't just describe beauty; it creates it.


Book Details

Publisher
Companhia das Letras
Published
January 1, 2006
Pages
320
Language
English

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ISBN: 9780066211312

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