You Could Make This Place Beautiful

I had read glowing reviews of Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. I loved her poem “Good Bones” (who didn’t) and thought I might read the memoir. But I don’t know if I’d have gotten around to it if my neighbor Rebecca hadn’t read it, loved it, and offered me her copy. “Give it to someone who needs it when you’re finished,” she said.

 I married at nineteen; luckily, possibly miraculously, it took. But over the years, I’ve grieved for people I love struggling with the wrenching changes and inevitable losses divorce brings. It’s so complicated, so hard. Nobody plans to fall in love, marry, have children, then learn they are completely incompatible—or worse, that they can no longer stand the sight of one another. My heart hurts for everyone caught in its web. I can’t imagine how they survive it.

 My heart hurts for Maggie Smith, too, and what I want to try to figure out, writing here, is how the hell did she make me feel like I was going through this divorce right along with her?

It’s not a straight story. No then and then and then, no litany of complaint. The book is all over the place in time, she repeats, revisits, rethinks.

 She warns us against plot.

 She tinkers with a play that begins with a pinecone and the postcard she found in her husband’s briefcase, threading it throughout the memoir.

Every few chapters there’s one titled: “A Friend Says Every Book Begins with an Unanswerable Question.” She poses a different unanswerable question each time. How to set it down. How to grieve. How to remain myself.

Another repeating chapter is, “Some People Will Ask.”

 “So, how would you describe your marriage? What happened?”

 “But you don’t regret the marriage, right? Because otherwise you wouldn’t have your children?”

“Why didn’t you write more about [person x] or [event y]?”

 Each time, Smith considers the question with brutal honesty, then offers a short, sometimes wry, truthful but not that truthful answer to the person who asked it.  

 She’s matter of fact in a way that makes your heart crack. “At least your terrible divorce wasn’t wasted on someone who isn’t a writer,” a friend observes. Smith laughs. A few paragraphs later, she observes her daughter standing in the kitchen and tells us, “A few blocks away, her father was moving nearly five hundred miles away on her birthday. He packed everything he owned. He left us plenty of material.”

 She writes as a poet, in language so lovely it could easily shift into a series of stanzas.

 She withholds. “Reader, ask yourself: Why would you want to see someone else’s children crying? My children aren’t characters in a novel or a movie or a play, they’re real and their grief is real, so this moment isn’t for you.” But you don’t need to know what happened, you feel it anyway.

 She’s fierce and heartbroken, tender and enraged.

 But she works her way through it—the book and the divorce—in a jumble of memory, a wild ride of emotion, a million what-ifs, and moments of lightbulb-above-the-head insights. Tears and laughter at its harrowing absurdities.

 And that’s just the half of it. As in all gorgeously written books, there’s a mystery at the center. I should have known I’d never figure out how it worked. But I love how trying made me even more grateful for the great gift of living for a little while inside a mind other than my own.

Maggie Smith chose this quote from Emily Dickinson for the epigraph of her memoir: “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself,” which is exactly what You Could Make This Place Beautiful feels like.  

Divorce or no divorce, this is an excellent book to give to someone you love.

In the end, aren’t we all out with lanterns, looking for ourselves?