You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

by Maggie Smith

Overview

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. T...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798891641570
Publisher:	Center Point
Publication date:	06/01/2024
Edition description:	Large Print
Pages:	500
Product dimensions:	5.57(w) x 8.79(h) x 1.22(d)

About the Author

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

Editorial Reviews

Maggie Smith’s book is one of the most powerful memoirs I’ve ever read....This book makes me see the women in my life in a new light, not that they are different, but I am.”
—Kwame Alexander, Oprah Daily

“Rich in nuance and unrelenting in its honesty, Smith’s memoir is a bittersweet study in both grief and joy.”
—TIME

"This book is extraordinary."
—Ann Patchett

"A beautiful book...stunning."
—Oprah Daily

"A triumph"
—Mary Louise Kelly, NPR

"Smith turns to prose to chronicle the end of her marriage and the hard, beautiful work of loving and valuing herself."
—People

"Throughout, she quotes the Emily Dickinson line 'I am out with lanterns, looking for myself,' and the book shines with a light all its own."
—New York Post, Best Books of 2023

"Sparkling & brilliant. Maggie was able to put into words things I’ve always felt as a writer and a human."
—Daisy Perez, CBS Mornings

"[An] elliptical, inquisitive book"
—Buzzfeed

"By engaging anguish directly, Smith carves a space for the beautiful over the heart that holds initials alongside 'forever.'"
—The Rumpus

"This book is a gift."
—Leslie Jamison, bestselling author of The Empathy Exams

"Beautifully written... Smith should be just as celebrated for her prose."
—Town and Country

"Incredibly relatable...At turns devastating and darkly funny."
—Columbus Monthly

“You Could Make This Place Beautiful is about recognizing your own worth in your relationship, and in the world.”
—Slate

"A poet’s memoir... [Smith] has an uncanny ability to boil down giant ideas into tiny, dense sentences that are both playful and heartbreaking."
—Shondaland

"An anatomy of....an artist stepping into her own light, of a mother working out how to create a loving family on her own."
—BOMB

"Smith’s prose is as warm and welcoming as her poetry."
—Chicago Review of Books

"Smith opens her heart like a book, dog-earing moments both painful and joyous...Smith's conjuring of beauty through pain and her special blend of vulnerability and encouragement go down like a healing tonic.”
—Booklist (starred review)

"You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a sparklingly brilliant memoir-in-vignettes that only Maggie Smith could write. Yet this is a book for everyone—who among us has never had our world upended by the loss of a relationship? Maggie Smith’s powerful mastery of language, and amazing ability to portray life in all its rich messiness, is on full display in this bold, brutally candid, and yes, beautiful, book.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts

“In this lightning bolt of a debut memoir, Maggie Smith gives us the truth of healing in form as much as story: getting through is no pretty, linear narrative. It’s one chapter forward and five chapters back. You Could Make This Place Beautiful gave me back a part of myself I thought was gone for good: the knowledge that beauty isn’t something out there to find. It’s in us.”
—Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

“Listen, you may not need me to tell you what you already know about the shining star that is Maggie Smith, but you can certainly add me to the chorus of those singing her praises about You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Among her singular gifts as a writer are the way she swiftly brings her poetry to her prose; her willingness to show up to the page with aspirational levels of vulnerability, grace, and joy; and a clarity of heart amid the heartbreak that together makes this a moving and gorgeous must read.
—Elizabeth Crane, author of This Story Will Change

“When personal tragedy strikes us, first we have to survive, then we have to begin healing. This exquisite book will help you do both. Reading Smith's memoir, I laughed and gasped and ugly-cried and somehow began to process ten years of my own pent-up, frozen grief. This book is nothing less than a cathartic miracle.”
—Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love

From the Publisher

Listen, you may not need me to tell you what you already know about the shining star that is Maggie Smith, but you can certainly add me to the chorus of those singing her praises about You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Among her singular gifts as a writer are the way she swiftly brings her poetry to her prose; her willingness to show up to the page with aspirational levels of vulnerability, grace, and joy; and a clarity of heart amid the heartbreak that together makes this a moving and gorgeous must read.

Elizabeth Crane

In this lightning bolt of a debut memoir, Maggie Smith gives us the truth of healing in form as much as story: getting through is no pretty, linear narrative. It’s one chapter forward and five chapters back. You Could Make This Place Beautiful gave me back a part of myself I thought was gone for good: the knowledge that beauty isn’t something out there to find. It’s in us.

Megan Stielstra

"You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a sparklingly brilliant memoir-in-vignettes that only Maggie Smith could write. Yet this is a book for everyone—who among us has never had our world upended by the loss of a relationship? Maggie Smith’s powerful mastery of language, and amazing ability to portray life in all its rich messiness, is on full display in this bold, brutally candid, and yes, beautiful, book.

Isaac Fitzgerald

When personal tragedy strikes us, first we have to survive, then we have to begin healing. This exquisite book will help you do both. Reading Smith's memoir, I laughed and gasped and ugly-cried and somehow began to process ten years of my own pent-up, frozen grief. This book is nothing less than a cathartic miracle.

Alissa Nutting

[Smith]...reminds you that you can...survive deep loss, sink into life’s deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new.”

#1 New York Times bestselling author Glennon Doyle

American poet Maggie Smith beautifully narrates her memoir of the end of her marriage and rediscovering herself as she picks up the pieces. Starting with her heartbreak, the memoir explores not only a very specific kind of pain, but also the roles that women embrace and grow into. From traditional gender roles and power dynamics to finding out who you truly are and giving yourself much needed empathy, this memoir uses snapshots of Smith's life to explore bigger ideas. Smith's pacing makes each word and phrase more powerful. Her performance can be heartbreaking, but her narration is charming and poignant. V.B. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2023 - AudioFile

American poet Maggie Smith beautifully narrates her memoir of the end of her marriage and rediscovering herself as she picks up the pieces. Starting with her heartbreak, the memoir explores not only a very specific kind of pain, but also the roles that women embrace and grow into. From traditional gender roles and power dynamics to finding out who you truly are and giving yourself much needed empathy, this memoir uses snapshots of Smith's life to explore bigger ideas. Smith's pacing makes each word and phrase more powerful. Her performance can be heartbreaking, but her narration is charming and poignant. V.B. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2023 - AudioFile

2022-12-06
The noted poet digs further into life after divorce.

The title of this book is the last line of Smith’s 2015 poem “Good Bones,” which went viral. Unfortunately, “my marriage was never the same after that poem.” The author first charted her response to the pain of her husband's infidelity in a series of Twitter posts that became a well-received book called Keep Moving. Then came Keep Moving: The Journal, and now, this memoir tracking Smith’s attempt to heal herself. Formally, it has much in common with This Story Will Change, Elizabeth Crane's recent book on the same topic. Both Crane and Smith employ the popular technique of using many short sections with long, ironic, and/or repeating titles. Here, there are 12 chapters titled “A FRIEND SAYS EVERY BOOK BEGINS WITH AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION,” suggesting a dozen different possible responses, and there are four chapters titled “THE MATERIAL,” which ask whether this book can be of any value to others. Smith combines these elements with other narrative gimmicks, such as addresses directly to the “Reader,” single quotes from other writers floating on a page, italicized sections, and a few of her own poems. Some readers will skim these sections, but without them, this would have been more of a magazine article than a full book. The highlight of the text is the author's children, Violet and Rhett. They say such great things, both funny and sad, blessedly not metafictional, often profound. “A few months after my husband moved out of the house,” Smith reports, “I was trying to calm and reassure Rhett, then six years old, at bedtime. He said, ‘I know, I know. I have a mom who loves me, and I have a dad who loves me. But I don’t have a family.’ ” It’s arguably the most memorable passage in the book.

As a wise woman once entreated herself, keep moving.

Kirkus Reviews