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No. Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on August 15, 2026.

Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner by Patti Smith book cover for the Book of the Day music book review

Our score

4.4/ 5

Excellent

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Paperback$9⁹⁹

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EDITION PUBLISHEDNovember 2010

Genres

Non-Fiction Music Art

Themes

Devotion and the shapes love can takeMaking art before recognition arrivesNew York City as crucible and homeLoss, memory, and keeping a promise

Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner

Name: Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner
Price: 9.99 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Patti Smith

Patti Smith

Patti Smith's Just Kids is the rare artist's memoir that earns its tenderness, tracing her young, broke years in New York alongside Robert Mapplethorpe before either of them was anyone. It's a coming-of-age story about choosing to make art when nothing guarantees it will matter.

The Review

Our take

Patti Smith opens not with the rock star she became but with two hungry kids sleeping in shifts, sharing a single grilled cheese, deciding which one of them gets to eat while the other works. That economy of detail is the whole book in miniature. She remembers the late sixties and early seventies of downtown Manhattan with a precision that never tips into nostalgia, because she's interested in the texture of being young and unproven rather than the mythology that came after.

The spine of the story is her bond with Robert Mapplethorpe, and Smith is careful about what kind of love it was: romantic, then something stranger and more durable as he came out and they kept choosing each other anyway. She refuses the tidy arc. Instead she lets their relationship change shape across years, money trouble, the Chelsea Hotel, and a cast of figures who drift through the pages without being name-dropped for credit. When Allen Ginsberg buys her a sandwich because he mistakes her for a pretty boy, the anecdote lands because she tells it plainly, with the self-deprecation of someone who was genuinely poor and genuinely uncertain.

What surprised me is how much this is a book about discipline rather than wild bohemian abandon. Smith and Mapplethorpe treat making things as a vocation, almost a religious obligation, and she writes the daily grind of it — the failed drawings, the cheap materials, the long stretches where nothing sells — with real respect. Her prose can run incantatory, full of talismans and coincidences she half-believes are fate, and a reader allergic to that romantic register may find the mysticism heavy in places. But it's the honest texture of how she actually saw the world, not a pose.

She is also a wonderful guide to a particular ecosystem of artists and hangers-on, the round tables at Max's Kansas City and the worn corridors of the Chelsea Hotel, where she sketches the famous and the doomed with the same unhurried attention. The figures who pass through are never trophies; they're weather, part of the climate she and Mapplethorpe were trying to survive and learn from. If anything, the book is generous to a fault, lingering on minor benefactors and forgotten rooms, and a reader hungry for narrative drive may wish she'd cut faster. But the accumulation is the point. The myth gets built one cheap meal and one borrowed dollar at a time.

The book turns elegiac as it moves toward Mapplethorpe's death, and Smith earns the grief without milking it. She had decades to write this and waited until she could do it justice, and you feel that patience on the page. It's a portrait of a vanished city, but more than that it's a record of two people keeping a promise to look after each other and to keep working, which turns out to be the same promise.

Why you should read

Readers drawn to artists' coming-of-age stories
Anyone fascinated by 1970s downtown New York
Fans of memoir that doubles as cultural history
Lovers of music and visual-art origin stories

What to expect

Lyrical, incantatory prose with a poet's cadence
An unhurried, episodic structure over plot momentum
A turn from love story to quiet elegy
Intimate scenes of poverty and creative discipline

For all its fame, Just Kids reads like a private document she was almost reluctant to share, and that intimacy is what makes it stick. You come away understanding less about Patti Smith the performer than about the years that made the work possible — the friendship that was the real masterpiece.

Reviewed by Ellis · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.4/ 5

Excellent

Buy on Amazon

Paperback$9⁹⁹

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Prices may vary.

Where to read or listen

Is Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner on Kindle Unlimited?: No. Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner was not included with Kindle Unlimited when we last checked on August 15, 2026.
How much does Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner cost?: On Amazon: Paperback $9.99. Prices as of September 16, 2026 at 3:48 AM EDT and may change.

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Common questions

What is Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner about?: Patti Smith opens not with the rock star she became but with two hungry kids sleeping in shifts, sharing a single grilled cheese, deciding which one of them gets to eat while the other works. That economy of detail is the whole book in miniature. She remembers the late sixties and early seventies…
Is Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner worth reading?: We scored Just Kids: A National Book Award Winner 4.4 out of 5. Patti Smith's Just Kids is the rare artist's memoir that earns its tenderness, tracing her young, broke years in New York alongside Robert Mapplethorpe before either of them was anyone. It's a coming-of-age story about choosing to make art when nothing guarantees it will matter.