That’s how it starts, this epic autobiographical love letter— to Mapplethorpe, to 1970-something New York, to the neon and the work and the rush—with death, like Greek tragedy with the rhythms of Catholic litany. Just Kids doesn’t really belong in the music section. It’s neither a tell-all, navel-gazy splay about the glories of rocknroll, nor a quirky hipster ramble sentimentalizing Manhattan.  

Instead, it’s Smith alone, writing down her own myth and ritual, which is probably one of the most punk-rock things she could have done. If bookstores were organized around breakdown, not buzzword, this would be shelved next to Sophocle’s Antigone rather than Dylan’s Chronicles. Patti’s burying her brother, as best and well as she can. 

Smith (the lady who sang “G-L-O-R-I-A”) and Mapplethorpe (the guy who took all those Polaroids) met by chance and fell in love in NYC in the late '60s. They came straight from the suburbs, so urban life was new to both of them, although both already had the drive to make art in their blood. Most remarkably, though, is how both sensed that they couldn’t go it alone.  

Smith spends pages chronicling how she and Mapplethorpe held each other up, from the egg creams they split when two cost too much to the rituals they created to help each other work. She describes how they discovered their saints (Rimbaud, the Stones, Blake), and how they deconstructed God, art, and their parents, and chose their own mirrors: Krasner and Pollock, Bonnie and Clyde; Rimbaud’s First Communion, before and after; the gypsy and the fool.  

Parts of Just Kids read like Olympian training manuals for how to make work, read books, wear Capezios, and hustle a city. But time and again Smith and Mapplethorpe compromise their bullseye drives to listen or nurse or encourage each other, always selflessly and perhaps most heartbreakingly when Smith dives off into rock-goddess land. 

Theirs was a holy, essential, admirable partnership that was possibly more about hunger and protection than sex. “Who are you do you have money are you twins why are you wearing a ribbon around your wrist?” asks a bug-eyed Harry Smith one night at the Chelsea Hotel. Obviously there’s a power and nostalgia in writing your own history, so it’s possible that life wasn’t quite as hand-in-hand as Smith describes. There are certainly rapturous, purple passages and dizzy chunks of image lacking narrative. But it’s honest: The prose fits the kids they were then. Of course, there’s plenty here for rock hounds to chew on, with an impressive supporting cast: Todd Rundgren’s parents, Janis Joplin and Pearl in one lens, Chelsea Hotel ghosts, and Jackie Curtis crying into her dessert. 

Patti creates a lens for herself, too. She talks about her family and her feminism, which is not a word she’d use, but it shines through, diamond-clear in her dogged belief in one person against odds, the need to work, and the right to love. She tells how writing criticism to meet mentors led her to song writing, and recounts the scars and stars of her coltish, ballsy twenties. Not surprisingly, the book reads like her lyrics do: breathless and historical. 

In some ways, Just Kids is a dirge for more than Mapplethorpe. It also portrays an older New York where one person could support two, barely but surely, with a day job at Scribner’s. Where someone could snag a big show without an MFA or a thousand Facebook friends. And in all ways, it’s Smith re-annointing herself as a writer, claiming the story, down to what she does and doesn’t say about Fred Smith, the man she met after Mapplethorpe, married, and subsequently lost to a heart attack in 1994: “Of the man who was to become my husband, I wish only to say that he was a king among men and men knew him.” Hole in her life, hole in the narrative. 

That’s the paradox and the brilliance. Smith writes to wake the dead, but maybe what she’s really doing is burying them rightly, like Antigone, and making room for something else to grow. In the last scene, she talks about the sea and emeralds: translucent, mercurial, springy. Hope. In the last paragraph, she dreams about Mapplethorpe, and he’s a boy again. It’s a sweet way to leave him, tucked in like her children, resting in peace.