Just Kids

Just Kids is Patti Smith’s memoir of her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. It opens with his death, then returns to her working-class childhood in South Jersey and her early love of books, drawing and poetry. In July 1967 she takes a bus to New York City with a suitcase and some art supplies, and soon meets Mapplethorpe by chance in Brooklyn.

The two become inseparable, living on almost nothing and moving from one room to another while both try to become artists. Smith has said she wrote the book to keep a promise she made to him.