It will probably never not feel weird rating a memoir, because in a sense it feels like rating an author's ability to recount their life to a reader, and rating that life itself. Thankfully, so many memoir authors make it easy, like Maggie Smith. Centering the experience of her divorce and being a single mother, You Could Make This Place Beautiful examines Smith's very personal experiences in a compelling framework, while also recognizing some of the larger societal issues at play, creating a memoir that feels more universal than just its singular story.
Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of several books, including Good Bones and the bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry, among others. Follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
In her long-awaited debut memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, award-winning poet Maggie Smith explores in lyrical vignettes the end of her marriage and the begging of a surprising new life. A story that starts with Smith's personal, particular heartbreak quickly grows into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, family, work, and patriarchy. With the spirit of reflection and empathy she's know for, and a razor-sharp wit, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. You Could Make This Place Beautiful is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother's fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman's love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is an argument for possibility. With a poet's attention to language and a transformation of the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.
I just wanna take a moment to appreciate the absolutely beautiful cover. I 100% added this one to my TBR based on the cover alone, and one of my friends told me that it was the last line in Smith's viral poem—I had no idea who she was or what she went through, I just knew that I wanted to read the pages that would have inspired such a gorgeous cover.
And onto the review of that story! The most unique element of You Could Make This Place Beautiful is the structure. Smith, a poet, incorporates a love of language and an eye for structure throughout. Readers bounce between vignettes, quotes from authors/creatives, italicized musings, and poems as Smith uses each form to create a larger narrative. What is rewarding about this structure includes the quick read it creates (I read this book in like less than a day), the ability of the reader to track metaphors and thread a needle themselves, and the statement it makes about how memoirs need to be structured (meaning, they don't have to be). While sometimes the metaphors become repetitive, and the lack of a clear narrative structure at times was frustrating, I was struck with each page the beauty of setting up a memoir this way, and Smith's ability to tell her story so concisely and vividly.
Apart from the structure, the language in this memoir is beautiful, and the repeated metaphors build a compelling force throughout the narrative. I particularly liked the "chapter" where all Smith's best lines combine to form their own coherent argument. I'm not sure I'm the target audience for the memoir, but had I been, I felt like that moment would have made me tear up. A poet's command of language always impresses me, and I was impressed with each page, insofar as Smith used language (not just the reconstruction of her own experiences) to create a gripping narrative.
Roxanne Gay probably said this best in her Goodreads review, and it's the one thing I seem to struggle with with memoirs (other than rating them, obviously). I refer to a memoir author's penchant to set boundaries. I would like to make clear that boundaries in memoir is absolutely fine, and respectable, especially when diving into a difficult topic, like divorce and its effects on children. However, Smith (as Gay says) "belabors" the point on what she isn't sharing. The crazy thing about this, to me, is that readers won't know what an author isn't sharing, so why make it such a point to share that there are things you're withholding? As Gay also points out, it creates some gaps in the story—a point with which I agree—and it's frustrating to feel like page time spent on mentioning what isn't going to be shared could have been spent filling in some other, more necessary gaps (I, for one, am wondering why we didn't get that one friend's explanation on the ex-husband's version of events, or how their marriage lasted so long in the first place, or at the very least the answer to the legality of the ex-husband's move). Regardless, I think an author can make statements like this without too much of an effect on the narrative (Michelle Zauner does this in Crying in H Mart). but it definitely stands out to me and distracts from the overall story.
This book is part of an effort on my part to expand my reading horizons by engaging more with nonfiction. I'm not sure if I'll read more of Maggie Smith specifically, but I love how this book has challenged my idea of what memoir could be. For more from Smith, follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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