Poverty was treated as a tolerable cost of artistic apprenticeship, not a crisis to escape immediately

Smith describes years of genuine material hardship, skipped meals, unheated apartments, secondhand clothes, alongside Mapplethorpe during their early time together in New York, but frames this scarcity as something they moved through with purpose rather than as pure suffering to be minimized. Both had come to the city specifically to become artists, and they organized their limited resources almost entirely around protecting time and energy for creative work rather than around comfort or security. This meant taking whatever low-paying jobs allowed the most flexibility, prioritizing art supplies and books over other spending, and accepting instability as the ordinary condition of the life they'd chosen rather than a temporary emergency. Smith doesn't romanticize the deprivation itself, she's specific about how difficult it actually was, but she also resists framing it as a failure or something to regret, since it was the deliberate price of the freedom to keep making work without answering to conventional employment. Takeaway: sustained artistic development sometimes requires accepting real material sacrifice as the ordinary cost of protecting time for the work itself.