Plus she’s an excellent, often hilarious portraitist, with a seemingly endless supply of captivating subjects, from Burroughs to Warhol, to Mapplethorpe, whom she is endlessly tender about and loyal to and infatuated with, and whose passing elicits one of the most raw-nerve eulogies you’re ever likely to read. Throughout, she is good company, by turns shrewd chronicler of the hard work that goes into building an artist’s career and disbelieving observer of her own success. The book flows through the city in all its energy and squalor, from mornings at the Chelsea Hotel to nights at Max’s Kansas City, until, one by one, Smith and Mapplethorpe get famous. Those wishing to know how it was, though-or at least how it felt-can do no better than turning to Smith’s 2010 National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, a masterpiece of social observation and self-scrutiny, exhilaratingly alive with what it is to be young and to love someone and to want things. More than fifty years later, with CBGBs now a shoe store and Velvet Underground t-shirts available in toddler sizes, the counter-culture has become the culture, and it’s near impossible to differentiate the baby-boom mythology from fact. In 1967, 20-year old aspiring poet Patti Smith moved to New York City, where she expected to make ends meet by working as a waitress, got a job instead at a bookstore, met budding artist Robert Mapplethorpe, and embarked with him upon the kind of bohemian late-twentieth century life that defined downtown during the city’s last great period of artistic foment. The Top Ten Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010) As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten-so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read.
The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, and the best poetry collections of the decade, and we have now reached the fourth list in our series: the best memoirs published in English between 20 (not for nothing: 2015 was a very good year for memoirs). We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website-though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task-in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We’ll take our silver linings where we can. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature.
Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches.
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