Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today I'm very

lucky and excited to have us my guest, Patty Smith, whose memoir, Just Kids, has been published by Echo.

It's a really extraordinary book about the life of two artists, Patty Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Patty, do you say Maplethorpe or Mapplethorpe?

Maplethorpe.

Yeah.

I always wondered, you know, people say both, and I didn't know which is right.

I think they're both proper.

In England, it might be Mapplethorpe.

It is an English name.

And they met virtually within days of Patty's arrival in New York from southern New Jersey,

and then met again and again over the subsequent months until they began to live together.

And this book seems remarkable to me. I only know a few books of what it's

like to be young and to be an artist in America and to find your own kind. One of those books is the biography of Delmore Schwartz.

Another is Brad Gooch's biography of Frank O'Hara.

This book, Just Kids, seems to me to be the best of all,

because it's in a first-person voice,

...