Just Kids

How familiar were you with the work of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe before reading Just Kids? Has your understanding of their art been altered by reading their lives?

“Robert and I were always ourselves – ’til the day he died, we were just exactly as we were when we met. And we loved each other. Everybody wants to define everything. Is it necessary to define love?” Is Just Kids a love story?

“Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced.” How does Patti Smith weave the figures of the poet Arthur Rimbaud and Robert through Just Kids? Do you think this pairing is intentional in the art of the book?

“Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.” How does Patti Smith explore the relationship between artist and muse?

“There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immobile. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other’s arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep.” Yes, Just Kids is Romantic with a capital ‘R’ but how does Patti Smith also show us the often-grim realities of day-to-day living in New York?

“Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to the universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil.” How does the young Patti Smith deal with Robert’s obsessions?

“We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.” What ‘light and dark’ do you find in both Robert and Patti in Just Kids?

“I didn’t feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.” How does Patti and Robert’s world compare to the world of Andy Warhol and the Factory?

New York: is the city a character in Just Kids?

“The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.” Why do you think it took 20 years for Patti Smith to write their story?