“Before Robert died, I promised him I would one day write our story,” Patti Smith writes in the acknowledgments of her 2010 book,  Just Kids.

“I kept my promise,” Smith said in a Tribune interview. Smith, 63, is one of the elder stateswomen of rock, whose groundbreaking 1975 debut “Horses” leads off with the provocative lines:

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine …

My sins my own

They belong to me, me

Not a technically great singer, Smith was known for her lyrical poetry, as evocative as that of her idol Bob Dylan, but also imbued with the intensity of New York’s underground music scene. That same gift for details, as well as eulogy, is at work throughout Just Kids , which is as much a memoir of her relationship with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe as a memoir of New York City in the 1970s.

“There are certain things about New York City that will always be New York City,” Smith said. “I love the freedom. But the sad thing is that what attracted so many was that it was so cheap and artist-friendly. It’s a less welcoming place for young people [now]. That’s what I mourn. It should welcome the young artists, and the poor, and not the tourists and upwardly mobile.”

In 1967, the 21-year-old Smith moved from Philadelphia to New York City to live with friends. Upon reaching the city, she found her friends had moved, leaving her homeless, jobless and hungry.
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She soon met Mapplethorpe, an aspiring visual artist and photographer.

In an interview, Smith is coy about any romantic relationship with Mapplethorpe. But she believed in his artistic vision, and he in turn, believed in her, as they set out to make names for themselves in their adopted city.

“Robert, for me, was so kind and supportive,” Smith remembered. “He was very protective. He liked people who were intelligent and had strong character. We gave to each other. We passed our strengths to one another. He was more ambitious for me than I was.”

The loose narrative of the book traces the creative and artistic stumbles and leaps of the pair through the tumultuous 1970s, as both strived to make their marks on popular culture. The memoir ends, sadly, with Smith’s grief over Mapplethorpe’s death.

Mapplethorpe became the focus of headlines in 1989, after Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art agreed to host a traveling solo exhibit of the photographer’s works. Mapplethorpe planned to exhibit stylized black-and-white portraits of flowers and naked men with a frank homoerotic subtext. The museum refused to run the exhibit, triggering a national controversy of what constituted art and whether the public should subsidize art; the National Endowment for the Arts had funded Mapplethorpe’s work.

“The controversy was aimed at just a segment of his work,” Smith said in defense of Mapplethorpe, adding that he should have earned praise and headlines for his art.

Mapplethorpe, 42, died in a Boston hospital in 1989 from complications arising from AIDS. Before he passed away, Smith told him that one day she would write about their story.

“What took me so long was losing a husband and a brother and raising children,” Smith said. “It was sometimes painful to write. At last, I have become so much stronger, and it was the right time.”