Just Kids

Just Kids, a memoir written by American musician Patti Smith and winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction, documents Smith's relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The memoir begins in Smith and Mapplethorpe's childhood, and moves through their young adulthood in the late 1960s and 1970s in New York City. Just Kids begins and ends with Smith learning of Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS in 1989. Raised in "rural South Jersey" (23), the oldest of three children, Smith feels she wants to be an artist from a young age. Though she doesn’t mind "the misery of a vocation" (12) to art, her home is "hardly pro-artist" (23). At age 19, Smith boards a bus to New York City, hoping to connect with friends at the Pratt Institute. Instead, Smith meets Robert Mapplethorpe, a 19-year-old boy, raised in a conservative, Catholic household in Long Island. Mapplethorpe has known he was an artist since childhood; he is "a natural draftsman" (13) who also made jewelry for his mother. Their serendipitous meeting at the former house of Smith's friends initiates Mapplethorpe and Smith into a lifelong friendship. 

In the summer of 1967, Mapplethorpe helps Smith get out of an awkward date with a customer at the bookstore where she works.