You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

A Quick Book Review: You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

The memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful left me breathless. It’s a scorching, gorgeous memoir about the end of a marriage, written by American poet Maggie Smith. 

Maggie wrote the poem Good Bones which you might recognise from the very first line - Life is short, though I keep this from my children - it went viral in 2016. At first, it was published in a poetry journal but within days it was everywhere on social media. Later, it was used in a television show and then recited by Meryl Streep in front of a crowd at New York's Lincoln Center. In a terrifying year of shootings, attacks and murders (it shot in popularity after the Labour MP Jo Cox was killed), Good Bones spoke of salvation in the midst of collective despair.

No one was more surprised than Maggie who suddenly went from being a mother-who-wrote-poems to being, well, famous. Her husband, who had harboured dreams of being a playwright but instead became a lawyer, resented her success and their marriage began to deteriorate. Or really, as she describes in You Could Make This Place Beautiful, it had already deteriorated; she had just tried very, very hard not to see it. 

‘This isn't the story of a woman who fell in love again and therefore was healed and lived happily every after. This is the story of a woman coming home to herself.’ –Maggie Smith

You Could Make This Place Beautiful is exquisitely lyrical, painful, sad, tender, raw and full of a messy kind of love and hope. Maggie Smith examines what it is to be a woman, a mother, a wife. A poet. Not a page went by without me underlining something beautifully written on it. Her imagery is gorgeous and unforgettable.

This is a book about the complexities of life, but it’s also just about Maggie, piecing herself back together again after the only way of life she knew disappeared. It's about motherhood and marriage, but also in a very significant way, it's about what it means to be a writer and to give that work (our work) the respect it deserves. These were some of my favourite passages. There are shades of Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk in the way that Maggie asks what it is to write memoir, to share, and to what end.

This is such a generous memoir and if you have any interest in any of the themes above, you'll love it and appreciate what Maggie Smith has given us.