I haven’t had time to read very much lately, between packing and making plans for our trip, but I did recently finish Just Kids by Patti Smith. The memoir documents the relationship between artist/singer Patti Smith and artist Robert Maplethorpe in New York City in the late sixties and seventies.
I had definitely heard of Smith before, but I wasn’t very well acquainted with any of her work, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Her memoir was interesting, I’ve always been fascinated by that time period, and Patti Smith goes into great detail about what it was like to live in New York then, and her encounters with icons like Andy Warhol and Janis Joplin.
If you’ve read Just Kids and liked it, I also recommend Wonderful Tonight, by Patti Boyd, she was married to George Harrison of the Beatles, and later Eric Clapton, and she was a model in the sixties and seventies in London.
She also has a lot of interesting stories about the time period, and it’s just neat to read about these incredibly famous and talented people that I’ve heard about all my life, from her perspective, hearing stories of them not as giants of art and entertainment, but friends and acquaintances.