Patti Smith’s Just Kids is ostensibly about her long-running romantic and professional entanglements with photographer and provocateur Robert Mapplethorpe, but the book is at its most rewarding when it’s following blind alleys. Run-ins with a blissed-out Jimi Hendrix, collaborations with playwright Sam Shepard, accidental dates with Allen Ginsberg over cheese sandwiches: This meandering memoir is rife with juicy snapshots of ’70s New York cool at its grittiest and most seductive. But while Smith succeeds in communicating the thrill of social climbing at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, she doesn’t provide much evidence of Mapplethorpe’s supposed appeal. Perhaps she doesn’t care whether readers see what she saw in him, but given that her book is largely a love letter to the man she alternately called brother, soulmate, and coach, a few more clues would go a long way toward making her devotion relatable.