I’d like to devote this column to the best book I read in 2024: Just Kids by Patti Smith. It’s old news, I know, it came out in 2010, so I’m late to the party. But Patti Smith blew me away, and her story carried me through a rather artistically befuddling semester of my own.

The book was given to me by my aunt and uncle years ago as part of my 18th birthday present. It was 2020, the depths of Covid, and my hopes of moving to New York City for college in the fall had just been dashed. So, they gave me a collection of books about New York City – everything from Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence to Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. It’s one of the best gifts I’ve ever received. Those stories colored in my Zoom-bound world and introduced me to a city I had yet to adopt, Billy Bathgate’s mafia madness on one end and The Bonfire of the Vanities’ social x-rays on the other.

Over the years, I’ve slowly worked through them all. In October, I hit the bottom of the pile, and there was Just Kids, waiting for me. I saved it for last, because, more than any other, it was the book people said I’d love the most. Friends recommended it, teachers lauded it. I was worried it couldn’t live up to such a reputation.

Just Kids is the story of Patti Smith’s artistic evolution, from poet to punk rocker, alongside Robert Mapplethorpe when they were young and broke in 1960s/70s New York. In the first few pages, she describes how she began to use her words, and find power in them, while lying sick in bed as a child, seizing that imaginative “elaborate sense of expanding and receding.” It was all so enormous and exciting, the tales she could tell, and she hoped it was something she could call her “calling.” “I didn’t mind the misery of a vocation,” she writes, “but I dreaded not being called.”

For the rest of the book, she tests that calling and proves it over and over, as her projects cough and sputter their way to fame. There are so many trials, doubts, lulls, false starts, she even went to France hunting inspiration. She wonders often if it’s all frivolity, this pursuit of art, “transforming the insignificant into the divine.”

I read all this as I struggled through another screenwriting class, reaching for a story it seems I’m not quite ready to tell. So, in that sense, I found Patti Smith comforting. But the beauty of her retrospective words, the way Just Kids brings memory to life, that’s where the thrill was. She describes her favorite coffee shop on Eighth Avenue as “the Edward Hopper version of Dunkin Donuts.” Such a specific, dead-on image. All those forlorn characters with their stale pastries. It made me laugh out loud.

I’m gushing. Truthfully, I could keep writing like this for hours, pulling more quotes I underlined, boring you further. More than anything, Just Kids is a hopeful book, a tale of survival when New York was at its grittiest. It’s beautiful, and just like everyone else, I recommend it.