A review by emtay
Just Kids by Patti Smith

emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.75

"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead?" (279)
This may not be Smith's endeavor in Just Kids, having accepted that the immortality of art does not extend to its creators. She instead embarks on a Homeric elegy to her dearest friend and lover Robert Mapplethorpe as well as the New York City of their formative artistic years. However, I experienced a personal rebirth. I am renewed in my artistic aspirations, inspired by Smith's succinct candor towards embracing her weaknesses, inspirations, and varied experiences as a young woman. I identified with her and found the hindsight with which she speaks aspirational. When she falls into "trouble" as a teenager:
"I had relieved the boy of responsibility... It is impossibke to exaggerate the sudden calm I felt. An overwhleming sense of mission eclipsed my fears" (18)
or when contracting a venereal disease from her dearest friend. She is loving and loyal. Creatively subversive while adhering to binaries of good and evil, life and death, God and sin. 
The only weakness is in the myriad of unexplained allusions to people in the scene, at some point, there are too many people whose eclectic influence on her life and not enough page. You have to accept the unknowing.
I am reminded of me and Jack. Of a love so deep I am not afraid of losing it. And when the love was young and ripe, I see me and Wes. 
"I was there for these moments, but was so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments" (159).
This is in part my plague. I love my own thoughts to the point of idolization, may this never stop me from living. May I walk alongside them, knowing they are there as a constant companion.
"It seemed being an actor was like being a soldier: you had to sacrifice yourself to the greater good. You had to believe in the cause. I just couldn't surrender myself enough to be an actor" (165).
This is why I have always maintained that the actor does not create the art, they are the conduit. The brush. The paint. They must be a little stupid. 
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