You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith | book review

A comforting first-hand perspective of grieving the life you once had and future you envisioned

You Could Make This Place BeautifulYou Could Make This Place Beautiful traces the end of Maggie Smith’s marriage. It is about divorce—its genesis, painful undertaking, and aftermath—and the powerful undercurrent of grief. While the subject is not one that resonates personally, the emotions, my goodness. It is a wonderful portrayal of grieving a life that you once envisioned unquestioningly and of not recognising yourself or your life anymore.

We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. we carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.

Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.

Inside divorced me: married me, the one who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence.

I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

This book is technically a memoir, but is more a stream of consciousness / journal / poetry-prose that reminds me of Nina Mingya Powles’ work, yet is uniquely Maggie’s own style. It doesn’t purport to be anything in particular, and Maggie is at pains to tell us she doesn’t fully know either. It is messy and that’s entirely fine—whatever it is, it is beautiful and perfect.

She is in no rush to get anywhere, but the prevailing theme is that wherever she is heading, she needs to keep moving, as is also the title of her 2021 book. Each chapter, if you can call it that, is short, capturing a specific moment in her healing process.

What happens if you don’t process what has happened to you, what you’ve done, what you didn’t do? It sits inside you. It can make you feel like you’re choking, like you can’t take a full breath.

In writing this review, I have found some criticisms of Maggie’s book, including that it is trite, ‘workaday’ even. I do not entirely disagree. There are no great revelations, and in fact, she borrows from famous writers. But I also don’t see a problem with this. It is meant to be real and messy, and many of life’s tribulations are not unique, even if they are individually devastating. Maggie’s writing puts words to these experiences.

There were parts I found a bit indulgent, like the entire chapter where she makes her divorce a stage play and herself the main character, The Finder playing improv as she discovers evidence of The Husband’s cheating. But chapters are short, and Maggie is not writing to impress us. A woman going through divorce is allowed an indulgent moment or two.

Maggie references Nora Ephron’s Heartburn early on, with Nora being a fellow writer spurned by her cheating husband, and wishes she had also written a thinly-veiled fiction about her life. However, they are fundamentally different books, with different, necessary roles. Nora, in Heartburn, is the older sister or aunt who has been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, and will smack you if you wallow with one too many ice creams. Maggie, in You Could Make This Place Beautiful, is your friend who has very recently gone through the same personal tragedy (I think Nora might call it a travesty instead of tragedy), and will tell you, it’s okay my love, eat all the ice cream you need, just remember to wash you hair.

I will leave you today with an excerpt of Maggie’s 2016 poem Good Bones, which she references in this book. You can read it in full on The Poetry Foundation.

Good Bones by Maggie Smith

Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world.

---

Book information

Title: You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Author: Maggie Smith

Published: 2023

Length: 320 pages

---

Book description

In her long-awaited debut memoir, award-winning poet Maggie Smith explores in lyrical vignettes the end of her marriage and the beginning of a surprising new life. 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. Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.