I Hope You Think This Book Is About You
Poet Maggie Smith uses her memoir to tell a deeply personal story that nonetheless invites readers to make it their own.
Review by Whitney Rio-Ross
Poet Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful is not your usual memoir. I mean this in the best way. I have enjoyed many memoirs, but I have been disappointed by more. I’m often bored halfway through the book. By then I have gotten to know the writer’s voice and their overall reason for writing the memoir. But even a strong voice and interesting material can get bogged down in the events recounted. I can empathize. Even in comparatively short creative nonfiction essays, it can be difficult to decide how much of your story needs to be included. A writer might know which moments mattered to them, but whittling down those moments, threading them together, and shaping them into something a reader will find compelling is laborious. Maggie Smith had to struggle through many of these typical elements of memoir, but she also gave herself the freedom (and challenge) to throw out the rule book. The result is meta-memoir. In most writers’ hands, the result would be sloppy, perhaps insufferably self-aware. But Smith makes it work.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful tells the story of a marriage, a divorce, and the aftermath. The actual divorce narrative is fairly typical, one I’ve seen play out in friends’ lives: Wife acts as primary caretaker of the children and does most of the domestic labor. Wife experiences success in career and therefore sometimes gives the husband more domestic responsibilities. Husband resents change of circumstances. Husband has an affair. Husband and Wife divorce.
Overall, the book’s story sticks with the basic beginning, middle, and end. Yet it comes in small bursts interrupted by quotes, poetry, an imagined play, and the questions Smith is trying to answer about herself. It all adds up to a book of reflection on relationships, grief, writing, and identity, all of which are tied together for her. A divorce memoir could be all gossip. (Honestly, given what I already knew about Smith’s divorce before reading the book, I also would have read that version.) Instead, the surprising, often cyclical structure allows readers to inhabit Smith’s grief. Grief is never straight-forward; there is no clear resolution. By inviting us to sit with her grief and questions, Smith is forcing us to sit with our own. I asked myself why I, a happily married woman with no children, was reading this book. I had to ask that because this isn’t just a memoir; it’s an interrogation of how and why we choose to share our stories with strangers.
A realistic divorce-centered memoir demands an urgency—urgency in all its pain, mess, and disorientation.
In her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott argues, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” I can get behind this idea. We don’t have a responsibility to sugarcoat characters who have hurt us; it can simply perpetuate their bad behavior. Lamott doesn’t insist on us using our writing to get back at those who have hurt us, though. She also says writers own their stories, but not the stories of everyone they’ve encountered. This is a big theme in You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
Smith makes it clear from the beginning that she isn’t writing a juicy “tell-all” smear campaign against her ex-husband. Rather, she calls the book a “tell-mine” and argues that there is no such thing as a “tell-all” memoir in the first place. She acknowledges, “[S]ome of what I’m telling is what I don’t know. I’m offering the absences, too—the spaces I know aren’t empty, but I can’t see what’s inside them.” These spaces are often where her husband’s “tell-mine” exists. She doesn’t share stories of his that aren’t an important part of hers. In a promotional interview, she refused to answer a question probing into the possibility that her ex-husband was motivated by jealousy. She explained that his inner world is not her territory and that she doesn’t have the authority to speak for him. As much as you might hate Maggie Smith’s ex-husband by the end of the book, you won’t know enough to be able to find out much about his personal life. I imagine some of this choice is for the sake of her children. (Writing about her children’s father is another thorny ethical issue she addresses.) Whatever the reason is, she set standards for herself, and I admire how she resists the temptation to ruin this man’s life to the degree she could have.
Make no mistake—Maggie Smith is the (admittedly flawed) protagonist and her ex-husband the antagonist in her story. This seems right for a divorce memoir, and if she is presenting anything close to the truth, casting her husband in this role is entirely justified. And she is angry. She didn’t wait to write the memoir a decade or two after the divorce when she might be more composed, and for that I’m grateful. A realistic divorce-centered memoir demands an urgency—urgency in all its pain, mess, and disorientation.
Of course, the issue of memoir’s ethics raises another important question: Why write or read one? Bad memoirs can be nothing but airing dirty laundry or asking for pity. Bad readers are often there simply for the author’s sordid secrets or cheap, voyeuristic pathos. Smith says that her book is not primarily “powered by anger, but by curiosity and a desire to understand…. This book is powered by questions.” Many poets write to understand themselves, which is different from “sharing feelings.” It’s a letting-go, a willingness to enter the page without knowing where it will lead or what monsters and mysteries we’ll encounter in the process. By writing this kind of memoir, Maggie Smith invites us into an intimate, winding journey. When asking herself why she wants to offer her story to readers, she writes, “[E]xperience is instructive. People make connections on their own…. I need to trust that you’ll know what to do with it.”
Lives are specific, but sharing them can result in a more universal connection.
The idea that one person’s heartbreak, with all its particulars, could speak and matter to strangers reminded me of another current cultural artifact—Taylor Swift’s ten-minute song “All Too Well.” (If you haven’t heard it, I invite you to stop reading and acquaint yourself with the most popular song of our time.) When Swift released the shorter version of the song a decade ago, she assumed that it wouldn’t be a hit, that it was too personal a narrative to matter to listeners. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Yes, the song shares details of her breakup, but those intimate details allowed fans to see their own stories. Swift has said that she doesn’t want fans to try to figure out who her songs are about because she doesn’t want them to think about her exes, but their own. Maggie Smith’s memoir does something similar. By including the unique features of their heartbreaks, Swift and Smith connect with strangers who also have concrete objects that are integral to their stories. For Taylor Swift, it’s a scarf; for Maggie Smith, a pinecone; for me, a poetry book. Lives are specific, but sharing them can result in a more universal connection. And when we’ve lost someone—through divorce, death, or other circumstances—we crave connection.
Apparently, Smith’s exquisitely written devastation did speak to millions of people, ending up on the New York Times bestseller list. (Is there any greater poetic justice for a writer scorned than having her memoir at the front of every bookstore?) I’m glad for that, and not only because I want more people to read her poetry and because I want her to recover financially from an expensive divorce. I’m glad that there are people learning from a story she is still trying to figure out. I’m glad that she can help other divorcees process and grieve their lost marriages, that she can show some married women the dangers of unbalanced domestic labor. I’m utterly delighted that she’s written an accidental memoir textbook.
I’m also personally grateful for the book, and not only for the writing tips. Oddly, this book about divorce made me more appreciative of my marriage. Reading about Smith’s ex, I realized that my husband could not be more different. He takes my writing seriously and encourages me to attend workshops and conferences despite how much housework and dog-care it puts on him. I’ve always appreciated this quality of his. Still, reading about the pain I have avoided in my marriage but tasted in previous relationships made me see how a supportive partner is a remarkable gift. Maybe that’s the best thing this book offers—the space for grief and uncertainty that might heal us enough to see what is, indeed, beautiful.
Whitney Rio-Ross holds a Master’s in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Reflections, America Magazine, LETTERS JOURNAL, The Cresset, St. Katherine Review, The Other Journal, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Birthmarks and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir was published by Atria/One Signal Publishers on April 11, 2023. You can purchase a copy here.
