I used to be turned off by memoir. Really, I wrote off the whole genre for most of my life. Maybe it’s an only-child’s preoccupation with the world of Imagination, or a persistent desire to escape our ever-more-gruesome everyday reality, but even the idea of reading about someone else’s real life used to bore the hell out of me.
This, of course, was before I started actually reading any memoirs. It began with Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy, which demonstrated to me that just because the subject matter is someone’s Real Life, the use of stun-gun poetic language is still possible. I moved on to other writers’ and artists’ memoirs, the most recent of which was Patti Smith’s Just Kids.
You have probably already read this book, or at least put it on your to-read list, seeing as it was chosen as the winner of the One Book, One New York award in 2019, and granted Patti Smith the National Book Award. Not to mention it was published a whole decade ago.
I was a sophomore in high school when this book came out, and while I think my teenage self would have found so much comfort, inspiration, and awe in Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe’s relationship, I think a solid decade of living life taught me to appreciate the craft and finesse of this book.
This, to me, is a perfect memoir. The story is focused completely around Smith and Mapplethorpe’s relationship and its metamorphosis from lovers to friends to collaborators and to all the grey areas in between. My bias against memoir I think comes from my fixed idea of the genre as a sweeping look at a (usually, man’s) complete life. It might seem silly to you if you are an avid memoir-reader because, as I’ve learned the best memoirs are anchored in some important aspect of the storyteller’s life; a particular relationship, a period of time, a place, an experience… Just Kids covers myriad relationships and time periods and places and phases of Patti Smith’s individual evolution as an artist without sacrificing the integrity and the intention of the book. She wrote this story about someone that she loved for someone that she loved, and that person is Robert Mapplethorpe. The specificity of their relationship is illuminated in all of her chapters, and it illuminates her life and the portrait she paints of late 60s/early 70s New York.
The specificity of Smith’s writing, combined with the mammoth emotional response that it conjured in me, reminded me of the James Joyce quote, “In the particular is contained the universal.” I highly recommend the particular flavor of memoir that is Just Kids, if you’re looking to find universal themes of love, grief, respect, collaboration and art.