Patti Smith is a legendary figure in the New York music, poetry and art scene, known primarily for her 1975 album Horses, and for her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. This beautifully poetic memoir focuses mostly on the period from her arrival in New York as a rebellious teenager in the late 1960s, through her meeting and relationship with Mapplethorpe in the 1970s. It's an extraordinary love story, which continued to largely define both of their lives even as Patti Smith eventually married, moved away from New York and semi-retired from the music business. Mapplethorpe died in 1989, and this very moving section at the end of the book is perhaps its most powerful chapter. The couple were really at the centre of the explosion of punk music and revolutionary art in New York during the 1970s, and the characters who she describes and collaborates with throughout the book are, in many cases, still household names: Tom Verlaine from Television, Alan Lanier from The Blue Oyster Cult, Sam Shepard, Fred 'Sonic' Smith of MC5, The Ramones etc. This is a beautiful and moving memoir about the struggle to create and to be authentic, it's fascinating and inspiring.