Patti Smith is known primarily is a singer-songwriter. In Just Kids, she describes her journey to this particular form of art so that it seems almost an accident. She might equally well have been a visual artist or a poet. What is perfectly clear from the very beginning, however, is that she was bound to become some kind of artist. The same is true of Robert Mapplethorpe, who also ended up achieving fame in a different art form from the ones (sculpture and collage) he was practicing when he met Smith.

Smith emphasizes the essential place the arts had in her life from the very beginning. She talks about her favorite books, from Foxe's Book of Martyrs to A Child's Garden of Verses. As a teenager, she immersed herself in the visual arts from Fra Angelico to Modigliani. The first major argument she recalls having with her father was over the merits of Picasso's painting. Apart from casual work to pay the rent, neither Smith nor Mapplethorpe either had or considered any job except being an artist.

The book is also the story of Smith and Mapplethorpe's artistic collaboration, from working side by side in their Brooklyn apartment and later at the Chelsea Hotel, which was full of artists at the time, to Mapplethorpe's late photographs of Smith, which added to her fame and which her husband said made her look like Mapplethorpe. The two artists were each other's inspiration and critic, a process which, despite the vicissitudes in their personal relationship, ended only with Mapplethorpe's death.

Both Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe grew up poor. When they furnished their first apartment at 160 Hall Street, they had to do so using objects scavenged from the streets. Smith in particular was indifferent to money and later became concerned when Mapplethorpe started to spend a lot of his time in the company of the rich and famous. In this sense, Smith and (at least initially) Mapplethorpe were not materialistic. However, they both formed strong attachments to physical objects, and the book is full of things which the author invests with great significance. When Smith was a child, she used to visit a girl called Stephanie, who had leukemia. She reports a strong fascination with Stephanie's possessions, some of which Stephanie used to give her. She kept these objects in a secret compartment under the floorboards under her bed, along with other treasures she had amassed, often by scavenging the streets. One day, she was so delighted by a skating pin she found in Stephanie's jewelry box that she took it without asking. She planned to return it and apologize, but Stephanie died a couple of days later.

When Smith moves to New York, she gets a job at a branch of Brentano's, which sells jewelry as well as books. Though she would have preferred to be in the poetry section, Smith is fascinated by one particular necklace, which she describes in detail:

My favorite object was a modest necklace from Persia. It was made of two enameled metal plaques bound together with heavy black and silver threads, like a very old and exotic scapular. It cost eighteen dollars, which seemed like a lot of money. When things were quiet I would take it out of the case and trace the calligraphy etched upon its violet surface, and dream up tales of its origins.

One day, a boy comes in and buys the necklace. It is Robert Mapplethorpe, whom she had met briefly before but with whom she now makes a connection through their shared appreciation of this beautiful thing. As she...