Two young artists in a broken city

Patti Smith arrived in New York City in 1967 with almost nothing. She was twenty years old, had recently given up a baby for adoption, and owned little more than a copy of Rimbaud's Illuminations and a determination to be an artist. She met Robert Mapplethorpe almost immediately, in Brooklyn, and within days they were together.

Just Kids, published in 2010 and winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction, covers the decade they spent side by side — in cheap hotels, in the Chelsea Hotel, in the world of the New York avant-garde. Smith writes about their relationship with warmth and careful honesty: they were lovers who became close friends, held together by a shared devotion to art.

The book is also a portrait of New York at a particular moment — grimy, cheap, alive with possibility — when the Hotel Chelsea housed a drifting population of artists, poets, musicians, and people for whom no other place had room. Smith and Mapplethorpe were poor enough to eat from street corners and resourceful enough to make costumes and jewellery to sell.

Mapplethorpe's photography, which would eventually make him famous and controversial, developed through these years. Smith writes about watching his eye train itself, about his ambition and his desire for beauty and his sexuality, which he was working out while she loved him.

The memoir begins and ends with Mapplethorpe dying of AIDS in 1989. Smith had promised him she would write about their early years. Just Kids is a book about becoming an artist, about a city, and about a friendship that lasted until one of them could not.