Readers who fell in love with Just Kids (2010), Smith’s National Book Award–winning memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, but were less taken with follow-ups—featuring a lot of elegant writing about very little—are advised to give her another shot. The question of that grave, seemingly Victorian young woman who materialized on a park bench in New York City in the first pages of Just Kids and where she came from is answered in an engrossing first section covering Smith’s Dickensian childhood in the late 1940s, including tuberculosis, an iceman, a ragman, a glass inkwell at school, and this heartbreaker: “On Christmas Eve after a long day waiting tables, before she boarded the crowded bus home, my mother bought two large lollipops and two small hand-painted wooden penguins for our stockings, all she could afford. When she got off a strap dangled; someone had cut it and made off with her shoulder bag.” Her romance with and marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith, a spiritual twin, fellow traveler, and father of her two children, is lovingly evoked, as are her close friendships with William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Michael Stipe, Allen Ginsberg, and her brother and tour manager, Todd; when Fred and Todd died less than a month apart in 1994, she went into a tailspin. Who else but Fred would ever be able to join her in the game of choosing a Jackson Pollock painting and interpreting it musically as “unfettered cries for the chaos of the world”? A fascinating part of the book deals with Smith’s discovery, after both parents have died, that her sister is only her half-sibling—she digs up the truth with the help of a child she gave up for adoption at age 20, with whom she’s since reunited. The reality of her parentage made a surprising kind of sense, once she knew. Included are numerous black-and-white photographs chronicling the writer’s rich life.
