Patti Smith's 'Just Kids'.

You don’t read this book, you devour it.

It’s a black and white photo, its charcoal pencils and the sound of them on a page. It's the scratch of vinyl, wooden floorboards, and the glow of a bar from the inside. 

It’s poetry and prose at once and its rhythm carries you along, like their portfolios, between apartments to hotel room doors and into taxis. You are free in this book.

It is nostalgia for everyone and is a chorus of yearning, having, and of the urge to create.

It is a memoir in the way the word ‘memoir’ sounds; seductive, romantic, exotic, poetic.

There is romance in the struggle knowing the success of the kids the struggle follows. The meanderings and happenstance of a bohemian existence seem so impossibly removed from anything that could be created today, that it can't help but be melancholy swan song for this long-lost era.

It is compiled of vivid memories lifted from continuous thought. It is precise poetry.

Somehow, everyone is in this book: in the yearning that is twined into the prose, in the ache of the recollections. The only thing that I couldn’t claim as my own are the things pinned down to location or time. Bring a pencil to this book and underline what you find yourself reading twice. 

She captures the essence of existence, its loss, its gain, and its continuous creation.

Read this book if you are an artist. And if you aren’t, read it too, it will make you one.