Patti Smith wrote her most famous book to keep a deathbed promise
Before Robert Mapplethorpe died in 1989, he asked her to tell their story. She spent the next twenty years figuring out how.
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe arrived in New York City in 1967 with little money and no plans — two young people who had found in each other both the permission and the pressure to make something. They moved into the Hotel Chelsea, split meals, and made work side by side while the city around them kept generating the decade it would later be remembered for.
Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in March 1989. Before he died, Smith recalled, he asked her to write about their time together. She had been a poet, a musician, a visual artist — but she had never written a memoir. It took her years to trust the form.
Just Kids, which she published in 2010, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. It is, among other things, a record of what it looks like when two people refuse to protect each other from ambition — when friendship becomes a kind of studio practice, a mutual demand to be more than you currently are. Smith said she wrote it as she imagined Mapplethorpe would have wanted: faithfully, without softening what was hard.