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I really wanted to go but it sold out so fast that it was unfortunately too late when I checked the availability. Patti Smith was discussing her memoir ‘Just Kids’ at the Los Angeles Festival of books on Saturday. The festival is free but reservations are needed for the discussion panels, which were happening this year inside buildings of the USC campus.
It certainly shows how the ‘godmother of punk’, as everyone calls her, is loved!
Patti Smith was discussing her book with Dave Eggers, the author of ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, and these are a few highlights of their exchange according to the LATimes and neontommy.com:
Patti Smith said she had a mission to write about her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe who died of AIDS in 1989:
‘On March 8, 1989, the day before Robert Mapplethorpe died, he asked me to write…focused on our little story. I was the only one who could write it, he had died; a lot of our friends were gone. I was the only one left to write it’.
She said she wanted to give a straightforward description of a man in a book that would ‘give Robert to the people’. She explained:
‘It took me so long because of its simplicity…I wanted it to be a fairly simple book. Robert wasn’t a reader’.
Smith and Eggers also talked about the consequence of being an artist, and Smith said she felt blessed while Eggers said he felt guilty,… when thinking about people who are ‘really working for a living’. To what Smith wonderfully answered: ‘Don’t feel guilty: We suffer’.
And regarding the writer’s lifestyle, I really can, in a very, very humble way, relate to what she said; I feel it every time I go to a show:
‘It’s a sacrificial life. You can’t live like other people…You’re always a little removed … you’re constantly observing and recreating’.