Books: Just Kids

As a rocker, poet, photographer, and now memoirist, Patti Smith follows her heart and her amazing mind to places that most of us can't or won't go, and she makes us happy to join her in a dream-like state that shows an everyday world full of magic and meaning, books and friendship. A coming of age story set in 1960s and 1970s New York, centered on her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, living in the Chelsea Hotel, and being an integral part of the explosive artistic and social movement of that time and place. Reading the book feels immediate and amazing, not like peering through the clumsy, bragging window opened by a typical celebrity memoir, but like a long, superbly-written letter from a friend you've lost touch with, crossed with something like an oracular vision of youth.