Ecco first published “Just Kids”, Patti Smith’s painfully beautiful memoir about her and Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe‘s time in New York together back in January of this year. In the short time that has followed its release, it has already become a classic. No other book in my recent memory has made as lasting an impression or has inspired such a collective, unanimous love and following as “Just Kids” has. I also do not remember reading anything in my life I’ve felt I had to share immediately with as many different people as this book. Although the New York City on display within the pages of “Just Kids” has long since past, its intense romantic, ideology is at the core of everyone that has ever been truly in love with any person or place. The resilient dedication to that love and to the creation of art in general is what makes Patti’s book so important and inspiring to all of the romantics and artists of our time, two rolls that seem harder and harder to fill in the age of the instant and the manufactured.
I read “Just Kids” for the first time while I was traveling around Europe this past summer. My last serious relationship had just deteriorated and I spent nearly a month passing through foreign countries reflecting on myself with Patti as my compass and touchstone. The time I spent with “Just Kids” proved incredibly insightful, intimate and moving and when I returned to the states to find almost everyone else I knew in a state of some kind of artistic, romantic or spiritual crisis, I guided all of them to Patti’s book, which served as a source of solace and as a reality check to the world and it’s scope.
