Just Kids by Patti Smith

A few of us had a hard time getting into the book, but many of us really enjoyed it.

Some highlights:

• Beautiful writing
• Couldn’t relate to subject matter, but still compelling read
• Hard to imagine that kind of unbreakable relationship
• New York in the late 60s was an amazing microcosm of famous/talented people
• Sam Shepard was kind of a jerk!
• We didn’t recognize a lot of the names she dropped
• Was Robert attracted to Patti because she was so masculine?
• Their relationship may have been more interesting than her struggle as an artist
• Waiting for her big breakout moment that never came
• Did she blur over a lot of “big” stuff?
• She influenced so many other musicians
• She didn’t make a big deal about meeting so many famous people
• She obviously kept a diary, with precise details such as what she was wearing to certain events
• Photography creates a visual record of our lives
• The overuse of modern photographic technology has taken the “specialness” out of having a single picture to remember an event; also, we are only seeing our lives through our cameras instead of being there in person!