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Patti Smith’s Memoir ‘Just Kids’ To Become A Series

There are many great books that are transferred to another medium. Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids is about to become one of them.

After winning the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2010, she was reportedly working on the screenplay the following year. Four years later, it is becoming a reality. Smith’s perspective on her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is set to become a limited television series on Showtime.

Smith released a statement explaining why she has chosen to adapt the book to a series. “A limited series on Showtime will allow us to explore the characters more deeply, enabling us to develop stories beyond the book and allow a measure of unorthodox presentation,” Smith said. “The medium of a television limited series offers narrative freedom and a chance to expand upon the themes of the book.”

Smith will be a writer for the project, along with co-writer and producer John Logan. It’s still early days so there are many other aspects, such as the episode count and the stars of the series, to be determined.

She has also finished working on the memoir’s sequel M Train, in which we will follow Smith as she travels the world with a Polaroid camera in her hand and a head full of thoughts to reflect on. Read the description here:

“M Train is a journey through eighteen “stations.” It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. We then travel, through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer’s society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy hits, to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation, alongside signature memories including her life in Michigan with her husband, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, whose untimely death was an irremediable loss. For it is loss, as well as the consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this exquisitely told memoir, one augmented by stunning black-and-white Polaroids taken by Smith herself.”

M Train will be available from October 6 via Knopf.