Just Kids

In the summer of 1967, two twenty-year-olds meet by chance in New York City: Patti Smith, a working-class girl from New Jersey with poetry in her and nowhere to live, and Robert Mapplethorpe, a Brooklyn boy still finding the shape of his art. They become lovers, then lifelong friends and collaborators, holding each other up through years of poverty, hunger, and relentless devotion to making something true.

Just Kids follows the pair from Coney Island to the legendary Hotel Chelsea, into the orbit of Andy Warhol's Factory, Max's Kansas City, and a downtown scene crowded with poets, musicians, and outsiders on the cusp of fame. With tenderness and clear-eyed grace, Smith recounts her own emergence as a performer and Robert's rise as a photographer, and the promise she made to tell their story the day before he died.

Winner of the National Book Award, Patti Smith's memoir is a luminous portrait of two artists becoming themselves — an elegy for a lost New York and a testament to a friendship that shaped them both.