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I never thought much about Patti Smith. The images I saw of her never attracted me, and what I knew of her Rimbaud fixation turned me off. I always had a problem with the Beat and Punk appropriation of Rimbaud as more a figure of rebellion than a sophisticated poet. For me poetry is a phenomenon of the page, not an outfit you wear down the street. I also never got into Punk Rock. Going to college in the fall of 1983 I had probably only heard of The Sex Pistols, though I had never listened to them. Then when I got to college I was immersed in it, without my choosing to be. I loved some of it but just never pursued it as an interest or as a lifestyle, it was just the soundtrack to my experiences. At the time I was more into focused listening of Prince (and King Crimson and The Talking Heads) than Black Flag and The Dead Kennedys. And somehow, even during college, I managed to never listen to Horses... until a couple years ago. But what a great album! and I would say about it what I would say about other Punk I've gotten into since - such as Television and The Minutemen - that it is nothing other than simply great Rock & Roll. So I grew curious about Patti Smith and then this book came out and I snatched it up. It's a sweet and gritty account of her growing into maturity and how it coincided with her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. There's a wise naturalness in how she grew into the woman we now know. There was ambition, but only on her own terms, and there was no striving to be part of a scene outside of herself (& Robert), though she ended up in one fascinating scene after another as the grimy and vibrant New York art/bohemian landscape tumultuously morphed into the previously unknown seemingly by the hour in the late 1960's and early 1970's. She portrays these scenes as the outsider she always felt she was, yet they're portrayed head-on, not through a scrim of self-consciousness or psychic distance: she was in the thick of it, even acting as a nurturing figure to many, yet she was also strangely apart from it. Throughout there's a focus on her intimate relationships and how their effects radiated out into the situations she was involved in, which gives the feeling of a real groundedness regardless of how crazy things were. But whoever she was with - Jim Carroll, Sam Shepard, a guy from Blue Oyster Cult - Mapplethorpe sill permeated her consciousness. In many ways they were alike, but in even more important ways they were very different, and part of the fascination of this book is pondering the duality they set up - Robert alienated from his family and erasing his past to find the future while Patti was always firmly bedded in her past and in her family, Robert's wild drug use and Patti's basically straight life, Patti's Victorian sloppiness and Robert's decadent minimalism, and of course the sexual complications. This book is not only entertaining but lovely and wise too.