The Most Beautiful Memoir I Have Ever Read

Just Kids is Patti Smith's account of her years in New York with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from their arrival in the city with nothing to his death from AIDS at the end. It is a book about art and friendship and what it feels like to be young and poor in a city that is also young and strange. Smith writes prose that sounds like it could be sung. I read it in a single day and immediately wanted to begin it again from the first sentence.