Smith's audiobook recording of M Train earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Album.

[2] While Just Kids recounts Smith's early life, the beginning of her career and particularly her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe,[3] M Train focuses on a later portion of her life, the period since the release of her debut album Horses in 1975.

[5] The book also discusses the 16 years in this period during which Smith was not performing; instead, living in Detroit with her husband and two children, she spent early mornings writing stories before her family awoke.

[5] In The Washington Post, novelist Elizabeth Hand described the book as being as "perceptive and beautifully written as its predecessor" Just Kids.

[2] In one mild dissent, novelist Charles Finch wrote in the Chicago Tribune that M Train "didn't change my life" but "it's also easy to see why so many readers say that it has," noting it shares Just Kids' "gangly but lovely writing, the same resolute faith in the consolations of art, the same odd flashes of humor, the same rawness to memory and experience...it's obvious why some readers find a deep, deep correspondence to their own inner lives in [Smith's] work.