23 March 2026

Patti Smith wrote this as a promise kept — she told Robert Mapplethorpe, as he was dying, that she would tell their story, and this book is her keeping that word. It is about two broke, hungry, wildly ambitious young artists finding each other in New York before either of them was anyone, living on nothing, believing in themselves and each other with a conviction that reads almost unbelievable now. Pick this up when you need to remember what it feels like to want something before you have any proof it will work out, or when you are craving one of the best memoirs about art and friendship that New York has ever produced. Smith's writing has this loose, poetic cadence, unhurried even when describing hunger or heartbreak, and the Chelsea Hotel practically becomes its own character. What stayed with me longest was not the eventual fame, which barely features, but the tenderness of two people choosing to believe in each other's talent before the rest of the world caught up. Read it if you are young and scared that your ambitions are naive, or if you are older and want to remember what that particular kind of hunger felt like. It is a love story, though not a romantic one in any tidy sense, and a eulogy, and a snapshot of a version of New York that does not exist anymore except on these pages. Pair it with a rainy afternoon and nowhere to be.