You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

This is a memoir by the poet Maggie Smith (not the British actor, “the American one,” as Meryl Streep said). She is a poet most known for her poem that went viral, “Good Bones.”

Good Bones
By Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. 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. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

Copyright Credit:
Maggie Smith, "Good Bones" from Waxwing.  Copyright © 2016 by Maggie Smith.  Reprinted by permission of Waxwing magazine

You can see the title came from the last line of the poem. The book is a series of vignettes, usually a page or less long, where Maggie tells us about what happened to her marriage and her thoughts and reflections on it all. She says it is not a “tell-all,” but rather a “tell-mine.” I have just started an online class on writing a memoir, and the instructor called these one-page-or-less vignettes “micro-memoirs.” That seems apt.

Not surprisingly, being a poet, Smith’s writing is beautiful, creative, lyrical, evocative, all the things. It’s also meta. Smith writes about where to begin and posits many possibilities. She begins by telling the story of reaching into her husband’s leather messenger bag long after everyone else in the house was asleep and finding a postcard written to another woman and several pages in a blank book he kept for notes and ideas:

I flipped to the last entry, the one followed by blank pages. I wanted what I read there—the story of a walk, a woman, a house, her sleeping children upstairs—to be notes for a novel or a play he was working on. But I knew these weren’t characters. They were people. I knew this wasn’t fiction. It was his life. My life. Ours.
~~You Could Make This Place Beautiful, by Maggie Smith, One Signal Publishers | Atria, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC, New York, NY, copyright 2023, p. 4

The vignettes are lovely, heartbreaking, and piercingly honest. Part of the honesty is that she does not include some things—much about her children, details of the divorce proceedings, and moments she feels should not be shared. Yet she’s incredibly open and vulnerable, exposing her own faults, ways she felt she contributed to the breakdown of her divorce, and thoughts she knows are revengeful and unfair to her ex-husband.

I like the way she uses some repetitive devices or words to express various reflections:

- “How I picture it:…”

- Vignette title and question:
A Friend Says Every Book Begins With an Unanswerable Question
Then what is mine?
how to carry this… and
how to set it down… and
how to forgive… and many more

- Vignette title: Some People Ask - Smith asks a question some people ask or she believes some people want to ask, then gives her detailed thoughts about the question, and ends with the answer she actually gives, then:

- “Next question.” - At the end of “Some People Ask.”

- Vignette title: The Play - When they first met, she was a writer and he was a playwright (he later became a lawyer). In these vignettes, Smith describes a play that could describe the events of her marriage.

- Vignette title: A Note on Foreshadowing - Things that happened which, looking back, she sees were foreshadowing what was to come.

- Vignette Title: Updating and Unblurring - Google Maps vignettes - Smith looks at the Google Maps images of the house she and her kids still live in, and where previously her ex-husband also lived. I never knew this, but I guess you can go back and look at images from earlier times. She speculates on what was on the inside of the house at the time the image was taken. For example:

“On my laptop screen I could see the windows of my house, the door, the periwinkle siding and the poor excuse for a flower bed—really just a moat of mulch. I could see the front walk my husband will come up in his suit and overcoat. It would be around 6:00 in the evening, already dark. The children and I might have seen him through the storm door, and my son, only three in January 2016, might have yelled ‘Daddy’ and run to greet him.” (p. 115)

Smith talks about betrayal in an interesting way. It would be easy to say the reason their marriage broke was because he betrayed her. He, after all, cheated on her. But Smith does not let herself off that way. She honestly tries to look at her own actions, what she did or allowed to happen, and how there was more to the breakdown than her husband’s betrayal. She says and proves that this is not a book about a good wife and a bad husband.

This book was full of “gems”—lines that seemed to shine on the page like beautiful gemstones. I have been married for 45+ years and could relate to everything Smith wrote. I thought of divorced friends and imagined that much of what she wrote would describe their thoughts, even as it does mine. I wonder whether reading this book would be healing for my divorced friends or not. Sometimes, I find it immensely healing to read writing that describes my life in a much more eloquent, elegant way than I would ever come up with. But sometimes, reading my life this way is too much to handle.

Throughout the book, Maggie Smith writes about wanting to forgive. At the end, she writes about wanting peace and resolution. The litigation and divorce proceedings are happening as she writes the book. The story is not over.

I highly recommend this book. The writing is elegant and literary and still an easy read. It will make you think about your relationships, yourself, and your life. It will make you both cry and laugh.