Just Kids, and; Life (review)

Justin Bieber, Canadian teen singing super-sensation, has written a memoir. So has Meredith Baxter, the mom from the ’80s sitcom “Family Ties,” perennial “All My Children” soap diva Susan Lucci, and former Van Halen front man Sammy “I Can’t Drive 55” Hagar. Given the choices in celebrity memoir, could all those readers whose purchasing power was the match that lit the fuse on the memoir boom be feeling rather let down by the current choices readily available for their Kindles? Can memoirs by the Kardashians be far behind? And what about the savvy readers of Fourth Genre, who are no less likely to read a book for pleasure than their Bieberophilic counterparts, but whose pleasures are less satisfied by the formulaic and often ghosted pages featuring glossy head shots on their covers? Anything for them beyond tales of crackups, addiction, recovery, stardom, and stardust? Surprisingly, yes.

Two recent and wildly successful offerings—Just Kids, by Patti Smith, and Life, by Keith Richards—offer full-throated revivals of one of the most durable antecedents in the history of life narrative: the künstlerroman, or novel of an artist’s development. These two distinctly different adaptations of the künstlerroman, Smith’s elegiac and literary memoir of the making of an artist and Richards’s robust look back by a Rolling Stones elder statesman, place at their center a singular artistic collaboration and complex friendship. Patti Smith fulfills her promise to lover, muse, and roommate Robert Mapplethorpe to tell their story, and Keith Richards offers a chronological account from youth to present day that is never far from references both laudatory and snarky to Glimmer Twin and foil Mick Jagger. Both give readers reason to imagine that memoir may yet continue to offer readers and writers not simply the pleasure of a gaze behind the curtain of fame, but a rich engagement with autobiographical form.

Many readers associate the künstlerroman with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which the rigors of childhood yield the artist his perspective, his subject, his true life. Patti Smith’s Just Kids belongs in this auspicious company. Her memoir conjures up two places: the New Jersey of her youth, where she was born in 1946, and New York during the heyday of punk in the 1970s, which she makes feel historical—both forever gone and vivid, but also epochal, vividly preserved, and capable of casting a spell. This makes sense for an artist who is heavily invested in her spell-casting sources: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and fellow musician and memoirist Bob Dylan. Smith embraces this company and makes the case that she and Robert Mapplethorpe have joined them.

Robert Mapplethorpe, the brilliant photographer whose images made sadomasochism iconic, died of HIV/AIDS in 1989 and is much lauded as a queer artist. Yet of Mapplethorpe’s fame-making work, Smith writes: “His pursuits were too hardcore for me and he often did work that shocked me.” She respected the work but found it brutal, and it made her squeamish. Perhaps surprisingly, then, she was not the censorious one in the relationship. Mapplethorpe often cautioned her against being too crude—paradoxical advice to offer a punk rocker—and proffered career advice she never took about conforming to expectations. In the arc of their flights toward fame, her collaboration with Bruce Springsteen, “Because the Night,” the single from Easter, went to Number 13 in the Top 40. “Unabashedly proud” as Mapplethorpe was of her success, she remembers his reaction: “‘Patti,’ he drawled, ‘you got famous before me.’” Given Mapplethorpe’s importance in the canon of queer art, it will surprise many readers to learn that she and Mapplethorpe remained lovers after he came out. They were a couple who mirrored each other’s artistic selves and together created a world: “‘Nobody sees us as we do, Patti.’ . . . Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was...