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You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith review – notes on self-regard

Smith’s memoir concerns the end of her marriage but its real subject is self-love

I n 2018, Maggie Smith, a poet and essayist from Columbus, Ohio, discovered that her husband was having an affair. He had just got back from a business trip, and something felt off between them; a barely perceptible change of temperature. So she did that awful thing, and looked inside his messenger bag, its unbuckled flap irresistible once he was safely in bed. Naturally, she hoped to find nothing. But alas, nothing was not what she found. She pulled out a postcard, on which her husband described a walk, and a pine cone found on that walk – the very same pine cone he’d given to their son on his return that evening. Also on the postcard: a woman’s name, and an address in the city he’d just left. The pine cone, it turned out, was a hand grenade.

Smith was devastated. But writers write, and in the years since this detonation, she has made full use of it, material-wise. In 2020, she published Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity and Change , a book inspired by the daily “notes to self” she shared on social media during her divorce. This was followed, in 2021, by Keep Moving: The Journal , an invitation to “use the healing power of writing” to see change as “an opportunity for transformation”. And now here’s a third book: a memoir (of sorts) called You Could Make This Place Beautiful . Please don’t fall into the trap of thinking that all this has been easy for her, however. Her new book has, Smith insists, cost her terribly at moments: all that honesty and vulnerability. She’s wrung out! As she tells her shrink, how much easier it would have been to write a divorce novel instead, one like Nora Ephron’s Heartburn .

In your dreams, honey. While Heartburn , so funny and piercing, is a close to perfect book, the cloyingly titled You Could Make This Place Beautiful is all the bad things at once: self-pitying, but also self-regarding; incontinent, but also horribly coy; trite and mawkish and bulging with what even its author acknowledges as “woo” (Smith, who only turns down the chance to attend a “vision board workshop” for fear she’ll produce something that looks like a late Rothko, sees a “regular” therapist, an “intuitive therapist” and an “emotional alchemist”). How terrifying to open a book, and find a long enumeration of all the cute things her children have said (mostly about her). How horrifying, to see a writer unashamedly listing all their positive attributes (“[I am] as funny as hell”). Quotes from other writers – Joan Didion, Clive James – should alleviate the agony, but not even they can save her. Dishing up that famous line from Whitman – “I am large, I contain multitudes” – she can’t resist coming back at him with yet another of her humblebrags: “But here’s the thing, Walt… Sometimes I’m tired of my multitudes.” This line, like many others in the book, floats alone on a white page, the better that we might absorb its author’s wit and wisdom, all her beguiling contradictions.

Look, abandonment is an agony like no other. To be a lover who is not loved back necessitates language that feels both infinitely renewable (we try, and try again) and utterly redundant, and it’s this that makes it territory for the writer: impossible, universal, the ineluctable quest. But Smith’s book has nothing to do with all this, and not only because her prose is so grindingly workaday (for a poet, she’s surprisingly fond of non-lyrical terms such as primary caregiver). As the more glowing of the reviews suggested when it came out in the US, where this kind of stuff goes down rather better than here, its real subject is not loss, let alone humility or forgiveness. It is about self-love, and the (apparently) “beautiful work” involved in the struggle to achieve this.

Personally, I could find among its pages no evidence that Smith did not love herself plenty already. Her husband, she suggests, left her in part because he was envious of the “fame” that came her way when one of her poems went viral. But this isn’t really my point. Self-optimisation – self-adoration – is the great disease of our age, a social pathology that makes a virtue of a certain kind of narcissism, and scapegoats of everyone else, and this, in the end, is why Smith’s book repulsed me. Its true moral is inadvertent. Every page serves as a reminder that it is far, far better to understand yourself than to love yourself. Love should be reserved for other people, who will always need it much more than you do.

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YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL

by Maggie Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2023

As a wise woman once entreated herself, keep moving.

The noted poet digs further into life after divorce.

The title of this book is the last line of Smith’s 2015 poem “Good Bones,” which went viral. Unfortunately, “my marriage was never the same after that poem.” The author first charted her response to the pain of her husband's infidelity in a series of Twitter posts that became a well-received book called Keep Moving . Then came Keep Moving: The Journal , and now, this memoir tracking Smith’s attempt to heal herself. Formally, it has much in common with This Story Will Change , Elizabeth Crane's recent book on the same topic. Both Crane and Smith employ the popular technique of using many short sections with long, ironic, and/or repeating titles. Here, there are 12 chapters titled “A FRIEND SAYS EVERY BOOK BEGINS WITH AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION,” suggesting a dozen different possible responses, and there are four chapters titled “THE MATERIAL,” which ask whether this book can be of any value to others. Smith combines these elements with other narrative gimmicks, such as addresses directly to the “Reader,” single quotes from other writers floating on a page, italicized sections, and a few of her own poems. Some readers will skim these sections, but without them, this would have been more of a magazine article than a full book. The highlight of the text is the author's children, Violet and Rhett. They say such great things, both funny and sad, blessedly not metafictional, often profound. “A few months after my husband moved out of the house,” Smith reports, “I was trying to calm and reassure Rhett, then six years old, at bedtime. He said, ‘I know, I know. I have a mom who loves me, and I have a dad who loves me. But I don’t have a family.’ ” It’s arguably the most memorable passage in the book.

Pub Date: April 11, 2023

ISBN: 9781982185855

Page Count: 320

Publisher: One Signal/Atria

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023

BODY, MIND & SPIRIT | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Maggie Smith ; illustrated by Leanne Hatch

by Maggie Smith

by Maggie Smith ; illustrated by Maggie Smith

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Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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Heidi Dischler

Book review: you could make this place beautiful by maggie smith.

A collection of thoughts, hopes, and moments that make up a life,  You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a memoir of reflection. With revelations that I saw in my own life and ideas that made my heart skip a beat, check out my full review of  You Could Make This Place Beautiful below. 

Book Information

Following Maggie Smith’s own divorce, adulthood, and growth after her heartbreak,  You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a lyrical memoir diving into divorce, motherhood, and the very things that make us human. 

Review | Heidi Dischler

While this review won’t be very long, I hope you don’t think that its length reflects its worth.  You Could Make This Place Beautiful is gorgeous in its writing and heartbreaking in its prose. It’s follows Maggie Smith as she tells her story about her divorce and how she recovers afterwards. I found it to be very relatable even though I’ve never gotten a divorce because I can imagine exactly how she felt with her descriptions. I can also imagine how it would feel to be alone after thinking that you’d never be alone again. 

I normally go through writing, characters and plot, but since this novel is a memoir, it’s rated mostly on content and the feelings that it drew from me. This novel has no formal plot expect the random timeline jumps, so it felt very… precarious in terms of knowing where the story was going. This is how Maggie Smith meant it to be, I think, and honestly didn’t hurt my enjoyment at all. 

The writing style is absolutely beautiful. Earlier, I called it lyrical and I meant that. Maggie Smith is primarily a poet, and you can see it in the way she writes and narrates her own life. Her writing style was probably my favorite part of the whole book. 

As for characters, since this isn’t a fiction novel, I’m not going to comment on them because this memoir is about actual people. Although, I will say that Smith’s son, Rhett, was absolutely adorable and so smart. He seems like an awesome little kid along with his sister Violet. 

Overall, this memoir is a story about moving on, learning how to be alone, and growing back into oneself after having be ripped from the other half that you always thought would be yours. Even though I’ve never been divorced, Maggie Smith’s writing has given me a window to see just how much it truly hurts and it was beautiful to see how she picked herself back up afterwards. 

Source: Audiobook from Libby Public Library

(P.S. You can read this book for free by signing up for a free trial of Audible, which gives you two free audiobooks of your choice!)

“Who's calling this laundry dirty anyway? It's just lived in.”

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Stet the Tears: A Review of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

By Amanda Fields

You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

by Maggie Smith

One Signal Publishers, 2023; 313 pp., $28.00

In the highly anticipated memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful , poet Maggie Smith works to unravel the demise of her marriage, all the while clarifying that doing so could never be an exercise of cold calculation. As Smith notes, “This book you’re holding is not powered by anger, but by curiosity and a desire to understand.” The memoir is structured in tight essays and vignettes. There are no vague asterisks, but titles, clear rooms of prose that speed up the pace of the book and make it hard to put down. In this way, the memoir taps into motifs across Smith’s body of work, in which she delineates the intensity and conflicts of life through a litany most clearly evidenced in the tweets that eventually inspired Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change . The anaphoric current across Smith’s work is movement, especially for women and mothers, who keep moving not just for their children but for themselves. 

Smith narrates a journey of divorce and a reawakening self that will have many women and mothers nodding with vigor. Just as she has become a viral sensation with the global dissemination of her poem, “Good Bones,” she discovers infidelity in her marriage. The main themes in Smith’s memoir are the shaping of truth for self and others, the stark break of betrayal, the sexism of familial labor connected to individual professional success in the United States, and the journey of shame, grief, and self-efficacy that marital breakdown can bring.

First, the truth: so often we are told to keep things from our children. Simultaneously, the genre of memoir lends itself to questions of memory and how we shape our stories and truths as a pedagogy for coping with what is almost always perceived from the conventional outside as failure. Even as they move through the often painful divorce process, parents must hold themselves to normative standards, not just professionally but in their own homes, with their children. Parents going through a divorce are advised (sometimes threatened) by ex-partners, family members, therapists, mediators, lawyers, or the odd guardian ad litem to protect their children from the ugliest parts of the process, and they are counseled to keep any sins under wraps for “the best interest” of children. Smith deftly moves in and out of this implicit question of truth and the capacity of children to love their parents in spite of the truth. One of the motifs of this memoir is the idea of whether or not Smith is allowed to tell her story the way that she knows it, and whether or not her children will be allowed to hear it. Readers will feel how Smith’s “hands are burning” from everything that surrounds and attempts to qualify or cordon off a mother’s storytelling. But Smith finds a way to embrace the right to tell the truth: “I don’t believe in secrets or lies as ‘protection’ because secrets rust.” After all, children are savvier and more observant than the dry policies of litigation allow.

In her writing, Smith seeks to move outside of these limitations. She notes through the memoir that rehashing these events for her own understanding is not meant to convey that she is the one on the side of moral righteousness. This isn’t a vengeance text. It’s so relatable, in fact, that it points to something many mothers, healthily partnered or not, can fully understand. A focus on culpability in the case of Smith’s ex-husband’s infidelity is too simple, for a long-term relationship holds infinite crevices. An affair can offer a relatively clean break, a crossing that tidily rationalizes two people walking new paths if the incident splits their partnership. As Smith notes, “Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened—if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely—it’s as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match.” An affair won’t explain the months or years of heaviness that two partners can’t quite pinpoint, or how such weight becomes indiscernible. It won’t explain the “shift” where “The Wife becomes more mother than wife,” or the often sexist distribution of familial labor that can unbalance a partnership. An affair won’t explain the slow build-up of sacrifice on the part of an artist mother and wife whose rise on social and public media causes discord with her husband.

Though Smith was experiencing professional success, she writes, “I made myself small, folded myself up origami tight. I canceled or declined upcoming events: See, I’ll do anything to make this marriage work .” Smith gives up parts of herself to try to keep her marriage together: “What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time. I would have done it for longer if he’d let me.” These attempts to keep her family together are resonant with the shame one can feel during the breakdown of a marriage. Marriage, after all, is supposed to work. And traditionally, women and mothers who divorce are made to feel that they have failed. I recall the initial moments of my own lengthy divorce: embarrassment and shame. I felt it was a sign of my failure that I could not fix something I was not fully responsible for breaking. But throughout the book Smith reminds readers that this is not about assigning blame or even understanding the causes of marital breakdown: “I worked quietly to fix [the marriage] so no one would know it was— we were —broken.” Marriages often fail when they are long past saving.

This memoir is also a reminder of how sudden a break from an intimate partner can be, how navigating the divorce process through the court system causes all of that intimacy to peel into detachment, and how this then affects the ability of former partners to demonstrate emotion or take responsibility for their role in the divorce. Smith’s publication of a Modern Love column in the New York Times illuminates this, as her ex-husband’s lawyer demands she pull the piece before publication. Her ex-husband then reviews the piece, redlining even the most mundane details, such as that he would work long hours, and asking her to eliminate a passage where she’s crying. He revises other details, such as changing “the recycling at the curb” to “the recycling my husband took to the curb.” This response demonstrates how inept and unfeeling the legal system of family court can be in the midst of a divorce process, and how much it can affect communication with ex-partners. As Smith writes, “The man I’d befriended in a writing workshop tried to delete my grief on the page . . . . I spent more in legal fees defending my right to publish that essay than I was paid for that essay. And the tears? I stetted the tears.”

What is astonishing and hopeful about this powerful memoir is that Smith is not just careful, but passionate, about ensuring that readers understand that she has every right to tell this story. Navigating betrayal, shame, and grief through the telling is how Smith, and so many of us, stet the tears and keep moving.

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Maggie Smith Tries to Make the Divorce Memoir Beautiful

Her new book, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” is an exploration of what happened to her marriage after she became a well-known poet.

By Sarah Lyall

The American poet and writer Maggie Smith exudes a beatific warmth, so it seemed apt — a felicitous pairing of author and venue — that her recent book tour included an evening at a Brooklyn church. The pews were crowded with admirers, many feverishly reading her new memoir even as they waited for her to speak.

The book, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” is about the collapse of Ms. Smith’s marriage — from her discovery of her husband’s affair to his decision to walk out — and how writing helped her survive it. Alert readers will recognize the title as a line from her viral 2016 poem “ Good Bones ,” which became a social-media hit and then a wider cultural phenomenon, a “mantra of hope in hard times,” as Slate put it .

“You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” which just made its debut on The New York Times’s best-seller list in the No. 3 position for hardcover nonfiction, is actually the second book Ms. Smith has written about her divorce. (The first was “Keep Moving,” released in 2020.) Somehow between the publication of “Good Bones” and now, Ms. Smith became that most surprising of things, a celebrity poet.

But if she has been a beneficiary of her success, so she has also been a victim of it. As she says in the book: “My marriage was never the same after that poem.”

At the church, where Ms. Smith — wearing a black-and-white dress and a pair of pink heels — was appearing in conversation with the novelist Leslie Jamison, the audience Q. and A. was pervaded by fan-girl giddiness. (“I love your dress,” one question began.) There were several queries about Ms. Smith’s writing process, and one about her former husband, an unnamed lawyer who wafts unpleasantly through her book, both villain and cipher.

“Did you have the impulse to ask anybody for permission,” one woman asked, “and were you concerned with how your ex-husband would feel?”

Ms. Smith flashed a serene smile. “I so respect and appreciate that question, and um, no, I did not feel the need to ask anyone for permission,” she said. She added: “I can’t make decisions in my life based on fear.”

In the book she describes how, soon after her husband left the house he shared with her and their two children, she emailed him a draft of an essay she’d written about their breakup for the Times’s “Modern Love” column. He responded, she says, with a bossy litany of proposed changes — tiny correctives to details — designed to cast him in a better light. Told by her editor that the changes would “weaken” the piece, she rejected most of them.

This time around, she said, she had no interest in soliciting feedback, suggestions or permission of any kind from her former husband. She didn’t even tell him about the book in advance.

“If you want someone not to ask you for input on their writing,” she said in an interview, speaking of her ex, “providing edits like that is a good way to do it.”

Ms. Smith was chatting in the empty lobby of her hotel in Brooklyn the day before the church event. She is as frank, friendly and accommodating in conversation as she is in her work. But despite her apparent openness, there is a vein of steel in her, a sense that, having thoroughly examined her experience from every angle in the book, she does not want to be second-guessed.

“Keep Moving,” Ms. Smith’s last book, interspersed short essays with inspirational advice and affirmation in Twitter-size morsels. (Indeed, many of them first appeared on Twitter.) Sample morsel: “Write breathe on your to-do list. Write blink . Write sit and eat . Then cross everything off. How satisfying! Give yourself credit for living. KEEP MOVING.”

The book was received as a cry of hope for a depressed world full of people who, like Ms. Smith, were facing personal crises in the midst of a global catastrophe. It had a special resonance for women juggling work, home, children and partners from their bedrooms in lockdown. Glennon Doyle, another writer who has gained a huge following by parlaying the vicissitudes of her personal life into multiple best-selling memoirs, enthusiastically blurbed the book. (She said that it is a reminder that “you can feel and survive deep loss, sink into life’s deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new.”)

Ms. Smith understands the irony of her situation, of course: that the debacle at home provided material for the book, which in turn gave her new financial security to support herself. The material also gave her the impetus — and the audience — to write a second book. As one friend commented on Instagram when Ms. Smith announced plans to publish “Keep Moving”: “You took those lemons and made lemonade, and then you added MF vodka to it.”

Yes, Ms. Smith says in “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” — but.

“I’m trying to tell you the truth, so let me be clear: I didn’t want this lemonade,” she writes. “My kids didn’t want this lemonade. The lemonade was not worth the lemons. And yet, the lemons were mine. I had to make something from them, so I did. I wrote.”

At the church, audience members talked about the rawness and honesty of Ms. Smith’s work, how it feels as if she is speaking directly to them.

“There’s something so comforting and familiar about sitting down with her writing,” said Brianna Avenia-Tapper, 41, an editor and writer who is at work on her own memoir, which she describes as being about “birth, control and birth control.” She added: “It’s sort of a thing right now, to be writing about divorce, and I love the sense of welcome and warmth she brings to it.”

“Keep Moving” was Ms. Smith’s fourth book, after three books of poems. She had won numerous writing awards before, and her poems had been widely published in journals and magazines, including The New Yorker and The Paris Review . But with “Keep Moving,” she invited the world to peer into her home and her psyche.

“Is it unnerving at times to write something deeply personal?” she said in the interview. “Yes, because whenever you write anything you’re sending it off like a message in a bottle. The more people I send it off to the more chance there is that it will be misconstrued or judged.”

Ms. Smith called it an “honor” to be more widely read. But it has brought the added pressure of attention in real time.

“I was able to write my first three books without having a sense of reader expectations,” she said. “But how do I go on doing this and pretend no one’s watching?”

Ms. Smith addresses this in the memoir, which is less a linear narrative than a series of musings — some short essays, some chapters as brief as a line — and a meta-dissection of the act of writing about something so raw and wrenching. It is also an excavation, a murder inquiry, an attempt to answer questions that themselves are hard to articulate. What happened? Why did it happen? Was there a single cause? Is there a way to make peace with the unknown? How should you tell a story this convoluted? She circles back to these questions again and again.

As outlined in the book, the fault lines in her marriage were familiar, especially the gender dynamics: She mostly tended the house and the kids, writing at home in her spare (“spare”) time, while her husband mostly made the money that paid the bills, benefiting from a status quo in which she took care of the details that provided the scaffolding for their home life.

But when “Good Bones” became unexpectedly famous — when its second half was read aloud by a character on the television show “Madam Secretary,” when Meryl Streep recited it at a poetry gala at Lincoln Center, when it inundated Twitter and Instagram feeds and was crowned “the official poem of 2016” — the demands on its author multiplied. Suddenly, Ms. Smith wasn’t just a mother and wife who wrote poems when she had a free moment. She found herself invited to readings, conferences and seminars; her husband had to pick up the slack.

Her husband, she says, was not pleased.

“When I would call home from a trip, I remember feeling like I was in trouble,” she writes. “I’d made his life more difficult, and I might pay for that with the silent treatment or a cold reception when I returned home.”

Ms. Smith is comfortable making herself her own subject and said she rejected the idea of fictionalizing her divorce in the way of, say, Nora Ephron, who skewered her ex-husband, Carl Bernstein, in her novel “Heartburn.”

“That wouldn’t have addressed part of my purpose, which was to understand my experience,” Ms. Smith said. She says she was inspired, in part, by the writing of people like Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk, though with elements of experimentation in her form. “There’s a whole genre of the divorce memoir and at the same time I didn’t want this to be just that,” she said.

Ms. Smith said she was dating again and was happy, though she didn’t want to go into the details. She added that she would never fully understand what happened in her marriage, in large part because she says her husband (who declined a request to be interviewed for this article) never fully explained why he cheated and why he left. That is the fundamental mystery at the heart of “You Could Make This Place Beautiful.”

One thing is clear to her, though. “My writing was not the problem,” she said. “It was the solution.”

Sarah Lyall is a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture, Media and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro desks. More about Sarah Lyall

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You Could Make This Place Beautiful

/ /   a memoir.

Published April 11, 2023

New York Times Bestseller

“Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.”

In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful , poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful , like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is an argument for possibility. With a poet’s attention to language and an innovative approach to the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.

Other Books

/ /  raves & reviews.

“Smith opens her heart like a book, dog-earing moments both painful and joyous…Smith’s conjuring of beauty through pain and her special blend of vulnerability and encouragement go down like a healing tonic.” —  Booklist (starred review)

“[Smith]…reminds you that you can…survive deep loss, sink into life’s deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new.” — Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author

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Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

In her memoir YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work and patriarchy.

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful , Good Bones , The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison , Lamp of the Body , and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change . A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times , The New Yorker , The Paris Review , The Best American Poetry , and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

Product Details

• Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers (April 11, 2023)
• Length: 320 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982185855

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Raves and Reviews

“Maggie Smith’s book is one of the most powerful memoirs I’ve ever read....This book makes me see the women in my life in a new light, not that they are different, but I am.” —Kwame Alexander, Oprah Daily “Rich in nuance and unrelenting in its honesty, Smith’s memoir is a bittersweet study in both grief and joy.” — TIME "This book is extraordinary." —Ann Patchett "A beautiful book...stunning." — Oprah Daily "A triumph" —Mary Louise Kelly, NPR "Smith turns to prose to chronicle the end of her marriage and the hard, beautiful work of loving and valuing herself." — People "Throughout, she quotes the Emily Dickinson line 'I am out with lanterns, looking for myself,' and the book shines with a light all its own." — New York Post , Best Books of 2023 "Sparkling & brilliant. Maggie was able to put into words things I’ve always felt as a writer and a human." —Daisy Perez, CBS Mornings "[An] elliptical, inquisitive book" — Buzzfeed "By engaging anguish directly, Smith carves a space for the beautiful over the heart that holds initials alongside 'forever.'" — The Rumpus "This book is a gift." —Leslie Jamison, bestselling author of The Empathy Exams "Beautifully written... Smith should be just as celebrated for her prose." — Town and Country "Incredibly relatable...At turns devastating and darkly funny." — Columbus Monthly

“ You Could Make This Place Beautiful is about recognizing your own worth in your relationship, and in the world.” — Slate

"A poet’s memoir... [Smith] has an uncanny ability to boil down giant ideas into tiny, dense sentences that are both playful and heartbreaking." — Shondaland

"An anatomy of....an artist stepping into her own light, of a mother working out how to create a loving family on her own." — BOMB

"Smith’s prose is as warm and welcoming as her poetry." — Chicago Review of Books

"Smith opens her heart like a book, dog-earing moments both painful and joyous...Smith's conjuring of beauty through pain and her special blend of vulnerability and encouragement go down like a healing tonic.” — Booklist (starred review)

"You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a sparklingly brilliant memoir-in-vignettes that only Maggie Smith could write. Yet this is a book for everyone—who among us has never had our world upended by the loss of a relationship? Maggie Smith’s powerful mastery of language, and amazing ability to portray life in all its rich messiness, is on full display in this bold, brutally candid, and yes, beautiful, book.” —Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts

“In this lightning bolt of a debut memoir, Maggie Smith gives us the truth of healing in form as much as story: getting through is no pretty, linear narrative. It’s one chapter forward and five chapters back. You Could Make This Place Beautiful gave me back a part of myself I thought was gone for good: the knowledge that beauty isn’t something out there to find. It’s in us.” —Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

“Listen, you may not need me to tell you what you already know about the shining star that is Maggie Smith, but you can certainly add me to the chorus of those singing her praises about You Could Make This Place Beautiful . Among her singular gifts as a writer are the way she swiftly brings her poetry to her prose; her willingness to show up to the page with aspirational levels of vulnerability, grace, and joy; and a clarity of heart amid the heartbreak that together makes this a moving and gorgeous must read. —Elizabeth Crane, author of This Story Will Change

“When personal tragedy strikes us, first we have to survive, then we have to begin healing. This exquisite book will help you do both. Reading Smith's memoir, I laughed and gasped and ugly-cried and somehow began to process ten years of my own pent-up, frozen grief. This book is nothing less than a cathartic miracle.” —Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love

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