You Could Make This Place Beautiful
A Memoir
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NPR Best Book of the Year • Time Best Book of the Year • Oprah Daily Best Memoir of the Year
“A bittersweet study in both grief and joy.” —Time
“A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes” (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author) that explores coming of age in your middle age—from the bestselling poet and author of Keep Moving.
“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. The book begins with one woman’s personal 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 “extraordinary” (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With this soul-stirring memoir, an award-winning poet pieces together a picture of life after divorce. After the breakup of her marriage, Maggie Smith is forced to step back and reexamine herself and her family from a fresh perspective, offering up fascinating observations that come across like a series of lyrical postcards. Along her winding and emotional path, Smith unpacks arresting memories, like sharing a bath with the boyfriend who would one day become her ex-husband in their first apartment and the pain of discovering his infidelity. Smith tells her story with heart and humor, giving us vivid and fluid sentences that uncover deep truths about marriage, gender roles, parenting, and human nature. You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a daring, intimate, and unforgettable book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Smith (Goldenrod) eschews the traditional memoir format in this mixed take on her recent divorce and its aftermath. "I've wondered if I can even call this book a memoir," she writes. "It's not something that happened in the past that I'm recalling for you.... I'm still living through this story as I write it." In winkingly titled chapters ("Email, Subject Line: Update;" "A Half Hour to Cry"), Smith details the collapse of her marriage with a bard's eye for detail: a postcard with another woman's name in her husband's messenger bag, "open, its unbuckled flap hanging over the back of the chair"; the discovery of half the family's savings withdrawn after an argument; and coparenting, through separation and a pandemic, before her husband moved 500 miles away. Smith often breaks the fourth wall to explain her writing process, which reads as a mix of self-effacing, self-knowing, and, occasionally, self-satisfied, especially when accompanied by aphoristic asides. ("A memoir is about ‘the art of memory,' and part of the art is in the curation," she writes in an imagined response to an imagined reader's query. "Next question.") This lyrical personal reflection is undoubtedly affecting, but as often it feels affected.
