Patti Smith, punk, poet, artist and muse, describes her coming of age in the 1960s in this award-winning memoir. The book describes her hungry childhood and adult life, as well as the time she spent struggling and meeting the instrumental people of her life. Her relationship, first as lovers and later as friends, with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is described tenderly. In addition she dishes about the scene surrounding the Chelsea Hotel and Max's Kansas City, and the vitality and changing mores of New York City during the 1960s and 1970s.

Smith includes a charming vignette, from which the book gets its title, where tourists, seeing Smith and Mapplethorpe in their eccentric get-up, identify the two as "artists" and not "just kids."

This is a highly recommended book for the Patti Smith fan, and also for creative people who will be inspired by Smith's struggles to become a successful artist. Smith is currently working on a screen adaptation of the book with Academy Award-nominated screenwriter John Logan.