While this will certainly be true of the movie version, the book itself is something stranger: beyond a memoir or love story, it's an advertisement and a manual in elegiac, twilit prose. "Just Kids" packages and pushes the Smith/Mapplethorpe brand: androgyny, voluntary poverty, avid artistic ambition, Downtown social climbing and hipster drug culture (with or without drugs), and it sells them relentlessly, if charmingly. Their complicated romance, their sartorial cool, their arty whimsies and their art are all unabashedly presented as sublime, essentially "pure," literally in touch with God.(3) It is a book, in other words, whose hyperbolic enthusiasm seeks to construct an addictive romance all its own, to recruit not only admirers, but Madame Bovaries, people who spend their lives in love with someone else's poeticized story instead of the reality they're in.

Young Patti herself launches her career in that very state, looking to the legend of her cultural idol, Arthur Rimbaud (4) to validate and even romanticize life's rough patches: Mapplethorpe's sexual defection, then later, boyfriend Jim Carroll's heroin addiction. She was, fortunately for us all, lucky enough, talented enough, shrewd, cool, and driven enough so that her conflicted gay boyfriend and her talented addict boyfriend both became famous and helped her up instead of dragging her down; but for most girls who take this path, the story doesn't end as adorably. 

If it sounds like I think Just Kids is in any way cynical, I don't. It's an innocent effort; short of "spellbinding," but as moving and fascinating as many of Smith's other works. What's more, it's rich in gemlike anecdotes, intriguing historical information, and admirable attitude management tips, particularly for shy young artists who hesitate to court their elders and betters. But it is worth noting here, in the context of a blog on addiction, that its narrator is so chill, so unflappable, so tenderly distanced from the sufferings, furies and anxieties of her characters that her story feels like it was written on painkillers.

We see bad things pop up along her highway, but we're slipping along too quickly and smoothly to feel the wheels run over them. She talks of having been angry and rebellious, but we never really feel the sting. When her bad-boy lover comes out of the closet she weeps for days, but we watch her beat herself up over it through a nostalgic mist, long after she knows better. Agony has mellowed into melancholy; youthful desperation, medicated with the elixir of maturity, is on the nod.      

Consequently, despite how powerful an influence drugs had on underground culture of this period, drug problems and their attendant miseries, though not concealed in Just Kids, bare their veins a bit coyly. Smith says she used drugs more for research than for pleasure, and she stuck mostly to pot, cigarettes and coffee rather than relying on opium, cocaine, heroin, DMT or any of the other Schedule III pharmaceuticals that flow through the plasma of America's creative bloodstream.

Rather than go along to get along, Patti Smith basically impersonated a junky while refraining from becoming one. Smith writes: "Everyone took it for granted that I did drugs because of the way I looked." But, she adds, "I refused to shoot up."(5)  Smart girl.

Nevertheless, her favorite means of conveyance is Rimbaud's drunken boat, and it always feels like she's high on something, usually the thing she calls "art." Insofar as addictive drugs are able to redirect a user's attention and motivate her so that nothing matters as much as the next fix, Smith's romance of being a great poet has the look and feel of a narcotic. Whether she's living on crumbs, cribbing Keith Richards' hairstyle or falling in love with a soul mate, her eye is always on the prize; her youth is spent in a riptide of desire.

In 1992, a small book called Crack Wars explored, in the most adventuresome spirit imaginable, the love affair between modern culture and drug culture. Avital Ronell, the author, concluded that drug use and drug culture were integral to modern society's acquisitive economy and self-transcendent aspirations. As a scaffold for her argument, she used  one of the founding texts of modern literature, Gustave Flaubert's 1856 novel, Madame Bovary.

The birthplace of "realist" fiction, very recently republished in a highly lauded translation by Lydia Davis, Madame Bovary is a study of romantic intoxication. It slyly positions its heroine's addiction to fantasy in the context of her town's drug store or pharmacy---the place where society tries to keep painkillers, medicines, and poisons culturally separated, while sold in the same room.

Ronell draws parallels between Emma Bovary's early immersion in romance novels, which were denounced as addictive in her day--- much as video games are now---and the "drug drive" that captured minds as diverse as  Baudelaire's  Poe's and Pollock's. (6)  (Her witty neologism  for our culture's system of order/disorder is narcossism.")(7)

Although Patti Smith is a star of the underground, and Emma Bovary stands for the provincial middle class, the highlights of Bovary's story that Ronell picks out show eerie similarities to Patti Smith's. I've listed six more below, but for now and here, the key ones are these five:

They both seek to flee the mundane, sober dullness of everyday life for something they feel more vertiginous, more salient.

Both model themselves on the stars of their romantic fantasies.  (Patti imprints on Rimbaud; Emma on heroines in novels.)

Both pursue affairs that a proper, "self-respecting" member of society would deem sordid. (Rodolphe seduces Emma amid the barnyard sounds of the county fair; Robert, who has started hustling, gives Patti gonorrhea at the seedy Hotel Allerton.)

Both play at androgyny. (Emma smokes a pipe and tromps mannishly through mud; Allen Ginsberg picks up Patti in the Automat, mistaking her for a young boy.)

Most importantly, they both turn to writing in an effort to revive romantic passions that have passed their intoxicating peak.  (It's love letters for Emma; Just Kids for Smith.) (8)