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Then a poet rocker, Patti Smith gave a reading at the small Catholic girls school I went to in Manhattan in the late 1970s. Most of us knew of her from our own late nights downtown, at CBGB’s or Irving Place or St. Mark’s Church. Getting her in the door and up into our auditorium was a coup for my high school classmates, who’d persuaded our headmistress of Smith’s talent, then begged Smith to appear at one of our weekly assemblies.

It was a beautiful spring day, the school’s huge windows flung open to Fifth Avenue. Smith arrived late, annoyed, in tattered clothes. She interrupted her first poem to make fun of us, chiding us for our school’s posh location. After another poem, about Adam and Eve, she stared down our school’s priest and snidely asked: “How’d you like that one, Father?”

Rude, crude, mean. That’s my memory of Patti Smith.

That’s why it took two ardent recommendations, and a National Book Award, to bring me to “Just Kids,” Smith’s memoir of her love for and life in New York with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989. (Thanks Jen, thanks Perla.)

What a charming read! We find Smith as a sickly girl, directing her siblings in fantastical worlds, a bedridden Peter Pan. That fairy tail ends when she’s a teenager and has to leave home to give birth to a child she’ll give up for adoption. Certain she’s an artist, Smith heads to New York in the summer of 1967. She finds work at a bookstore. A manager preys on her; Mapplethorpe comes to her rescue. Their romance begins.

What a pair. Mapplethorpe is so beautiful men and women seek him out. Smith is so slender the poet Allen Ginsberg tries to pick her up, mistaking her for a pretty boy. Both declare themselves slaves to art, and go hungry choosing supplies over food. Smith draws and writes and harbors a secret kinship with rocker Jim Morrison. Mapplethorpe, who became a celebrated photographer, spends years making collages and jewelry before someone hands him a Polaroid. Even then he can’t afford the film.

They’re so broke Mapplethorpe hustles to pay their rent; when he begins dating men Patti thinks she’s failed him, and they part. When they get back together they find a happy home within the Chelsea Hotel. They part for good when Mapplethorpe takes up with an older man.

Before he dies, Mapplethorpe urges Patti to tell their story. This is it, and it’s well worth reading. It’s a love story set in a New York that no longer exists.