Patti Smith

Winner of the 2010 Non-Fiction National Book Award Patti Smith's evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her extraordinary relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe

Just Kids

Zein Esber

It was if a saint had died, one who had offered up healing music yet was not permitted to heal himself. 

darby

Our lives were moving at such speed that we just kept going. 

clara

I felt instantly confined by the notion that we are born into a world where everything was mapped out by those before us. I struggled to suppress destructive impulses and worked instead on creative ones. 

Emma Hak-Kovacs

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed.

It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

🎠

We learned we wanted too much. We could only give from the perspective of who we were and what we had. Apart, we were able to see with even greater clarity that we didn’t want to be without each other.

kiana carpino 

tara  (she/her)

Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?

Sarah Christine Gill

It occurred to him that nothing was going to happen. 

He adjusted a gilded frame above the mantel. He noticed the blood coursing through the veins crossing his wrist and the bright edges of his cuff. He noticed the room in planes, sirens and dogs, the walls in their pulse. He became aware that he was clenching his teeth. He noticed his own breath like the breath of a collapsing god. A terrible lucidity came over him; a stop-motion force dropping him to his knees. A string of remembrances stretched like taffy accusing faces of fellow cadets, holy water flooding the latrine, classmates passing like indifferent dogs, his father's disapproval, expulsion from ROTC, and his mother's tears, bleeding with his own loneliness the apocalypse of his world. 

We hit the street. He was hungry but he refused to eat my anchovy sandwiches, so we ended up having grits and eggs at the Pink Tea Cup. Somehow the day slipped away. It was cloudy and dark and Robert kept watching for the sun. Finally, in late afternoon, it started to clear. We crossed Washington Square just as the sky threatened to darken again. Robert became worried that we were going to mniss the light, and we ran the rest of the way to One Fifth Avenue. 

The light was already fading. He had no assistant. We never talked about what we would do, or what it would look like. He would shoot it. I would be shot. 

I had my look in mind. He had his light in mind. That is all. 

Sam's apartment was spartan, all white and nearly empty, with a tall avocado tree by the window overlooking Fifth Avenue. There was a massive prism that refracted the light, breaking it into rainbows cascad- ing on the wall across from a white radiator. Robert placed me by the triangle. His hands trembled slightly as he readied to shoot. I stood. 

The clouds kept moving back and forth. Something happened with his light meter and he became slightly agitated. He took a few shots. He abandoned the light meter. A cloud went by and the triangle disappeared. He said, "You know, I really like the whiteness of the shirt. 

Can you take the jacket off?" I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow. 

"It's back," he said. He took a few more shots. "I got it." "How do you know?" "I just know." He took twelve pictures that day. Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. “This one has the magic," he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

Both of them were ahead of their time, but they didn't live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.

Parting was always wrenching. I felt haunted by the idea that if I stayed with him he would live. […] My love for him could not save him. His love for life could not save him. 

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