172. "Just Kids" by Patti Smith

Singer and writer Patti Smith recounts her love affair and lifelong friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe in Just Kids. She met him on her first day in New York City in the late 1960s, and during subsequent encounters, they quickly formed a strong bond that endured Mapplethorpe's exploration of his homosexuality, his "hustling" for money, their poverty, and their mutual artistic aspirations and successes.

Mapplethorpe died of AIDS complications in 1989. Knowing this makes for nail-biting reading about his sexual practices, but it's clear that he wasn't an anomaly in the young, broke crowd of artists of which he and Smith were part. While she never worked as a prostitute, she dated several men who did, and her own survival seems almost miraculous. She talks movingly about Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, as well as other acquaintances and friends who died young and tragically.

One weakness in the book, at least for me, is that Smith assumes her readers are familiar with the entire motley cast of characters that hung around the Chelsea Hotel in the early 1970s. While I recognize many of these names, many others are completely foreign to me, and this made the narrative difficult to follow at times.

Overall, however, this is an honest, poignant memoir of youth, exploration, love, and loss. Enjoyable, provocative, and powerful.