I recently added two engaging and informative show business memoirs to my collection. The first, having recently won the National Book Award, is all the rage. The second was all the rage in 2006. (Even though I am not on the cutting edge, I eventually catch up.)

Just Kids is Patti Smith’s memoir about her youth and the early years of her career, focusing mostly on her intense relationship with the soon to be notorious photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Given my initial impression of her (based mostly on her Saturday Night Live appearance in 1975 when I was 14) I was surprised to learn that in her youth she was much less the rock and roll hellion and much more the arty type. She came from a family that adored books and after a pregnancy at age 19 she escaped New Jersey and moved to New York in the mid 60’s. Early Smith was a waif on gritty streets who met avant-garde artists and poets and musicians including Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick, Sam Shepard, Janice Joplin, Gregory Corso, Todd Rundgren, and Allen Ginsberg (who, thinking Smith was a boy, tried to pick her up). Some of these encounters make thrilling reading.

Her most significant fellow traveler, however, was Mapplethorpe. At first he was a chance encounter, but the two became lovers, friends, and seekers of beauty who lived Rimbaud-inspired lives of romantic desperation in the artistic vortex of the Chelsea Hotel. Even after Mapplethorpe became attached romantically and financially to his patron Samuel Wagstaff, Jr. , Mapplethorpe and Smith remained “co-muses,” even as his art grew more sadomasochistic and Smith moved on to great success in the music business. (Their most famous collaboration is the cover photo of Smith’s 1975 album, Horses.) What will stick with me most about this memoir is Smith’s voice, which is so overtly poetic and laden with literary references that it set off my “pretentious alarm,” but on the other hand is so precisely detailed that I reveled in it.

If Patti Smith is the rock star who writes like a poet, Diablo Cody is a kind of “embedded journalist” who writes like a rock star. Her memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper is a quick and sensational read. Cody is a bright young woman who, like Smith, left her home (in Cody’s case Chicago) for a new start (in Minneapolis), but instead of getting caught up in the world of art, she shimmies into the world of smut. With jangly humor and Red Bull pace, she reports on her ever-escalating adventures in non-contact titty bars, hard-sell “hustle clubs,” Plexiglas masturbation booths, and finally VIP rooms in which gentlemen pay for “bed dances.” Each incremental shinny up the porno pole is described in pungent detail and with a triumphant power.

Cody has an over-the-top-hyper-Gilmore Girls-bloggy-cleverness that I found off-putting until she calmed down a few chapters in. But when the physical and financial details of her career on the seedy side of the show business are exposed there is humor and complexity. It’s not a surprise that after the stripping Cody burned out, the writing Cody got noticed. Her Hollywood career has flourished, most notably with her screenwriting credit for the wonderful Juno, in which the titular pregnant teen has a voice that sounds like Cody’s, only a few years more innocent.

These books were written by wonderful writers at different stages in their lives and careers, and I’m pleased that both of them have more to tell. In the future, I look forward to at least two more additions to my collection of show business memoirs.

“Broadway Fred” appears every Wednesday.

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