You Could Make this Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith.
In 2018, Maggie Smith, a poet and essayist from Columbus, Ohio, had a very terrible evening. Her husband had just returned from a business trip, and the feeling she’d had that something was off between them felt like a siren. So she did that shameful act, and looked inside his unpacked suitcase when he went to bed.
Of course, she prayed to find nothing. But, in the end, nothing was not what she found. Along with another painful item, she pulled out a postcard with a woman’s name and an address in the city he’d just left.
Smith was devastated; her marriage was over.
Of all the events preceding the explosion that Smith recalls, one was the perfect storm:
In 2016, her poem entitled Good Bones went viral. In it, she explores the concept of life and the state of the world through the eyes of a mother.
The Heartbreak of Abandonment
Being a writer, she was the quintissential stay-at-home mom. Given her and her husband’s work situations, it made sense. Yet she’d felt his patriarchal attitude. When the poem’s success led to myriad reading invitations and other engagements causing her to be away from home more often, her husband had to pick up the slack.
He was not a happy camper. Had she been paying closer attention, she writes, she would have seen a trail of his transgressions.
Divorce: The Personal and Patriarchal
Smith uses her husband’s misogynistic attitude and his affair as a window to explore the power dynamics in her marriage, the juggling of work and motherhood, and the considering the worth and value of her time—even when not bringing home most of the bacon.
She examines what part of the problem was unique to their marriage leading to her own personal heartbreak and the agony of abandonment. And she shares a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, what Good Bones is about, and a woman’s love and regard for herself.
Then she widens the view coming to terms with present-day womanhood, prescribed gender roles, and the power struggles that persist even in many forward-thinking households. And the fact that we live in a patriarchal society.
Unique Memoir Structure
There are three entities involved in memoir-writing: the author, writer, and protagonist. Usually, the author tells her tale through the eyes of the protagonist—that is, the main character on the page—whom we come to care about and identify with. The author as “writer” is seldom present on the page. But here, Smith, as writer, intervenes and tells us what she’s learning as she writes. It takes a brilliant wordsmith to capture her truth in this manner where the narrative itself becomes the author’s healing (and our teaching.)
We find separate stories throughout, each, its own little vignette. Yet, their power is cumulative and builds into a larger investigation. Devastatingly raw and humble, Smith becomes her loss; it’s as if, she and the reader are entering her deepest, richest places for the first time together.
All without once mentioning her husband’s name.
Writing To Heal
Smith realizes that in the consequence of loss we can find our power and make something new and beautiful. The “beautiful work” involved for her, in part, is inviting the reader to be witness to her writing and healing process.
A steadfast look at what it means to live and write our own lives, You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a cacophany of Smith’s ponderings about humiliating secrets, rage, desperation, and narrative itself.
“Like, my kids’ math homework,” she shares of her writing process in an interview, “the teacher says, ‘Don’t just give me the answer. Show your thinking.’ So I wanted to be able to show my thinking in this book.”
