... having been breathed out

Mission Actually Finish Some Books 2/9:
Just Kids, by Patti Smith

The last 50 pages were just full-on non-stop sobbing. Half an hour after finishing it I wanted to rededicate my life on the altars of Art and Friendship. I would say that’s a pretty successful memoir.


“It was a simple photograph. My hair is braided like Frida Kahlo’s. The sun is in my eyes. And I am looking at Robert and he is alive."

***

"I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow.”

***

“He was the artist of my life.”

We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.

—Patti Smith, Just Kids

Everything distracted me, but most of all myself. Robert would come over to my side of our loft and scold me. Without his arranging hand, I lived in a state of heightened chaos. I set the typewriter on an orange crate. The floor was littered with pages of onionskin filled with half-written songs, meditations on the death of Mayakovsky, and ruminations about Bob Dylan. The room was strewn with records to review. The wall was tacked with my heroes but my efforts seemed less than heroic. I sat on the floor and tried to write and chopped my hair instead. The things I thought would happen didn’t. Things I never anticipated unfolded.

—Patti Smith, Just Kids