You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Maggie Smith is a poet, and this book about the end of her marriage is exquisite.

I loved her careful prose, her honesty, and the book’s format (with its varying chapter lengths and her perfect word choice, it often reads like poetry). I love being married to my husband of 20+ years, but this book reminds me that, in the end, I belong to me. It’s healthy and necessary to search out my own joy.

As someone who writes in verse, I’m a huge Maggie Smith fan.

Smith is known best for her poetry, but her memoir was beautifully poetic—it was proof that poetry cannot be contained to a particular format or definition. I devoured this book because the language was beautiful, and while the story was vulnerable, the way it was told was even better.

This memoir is written by the great poet, Maggie Smith. I could have read You Could Make This Place Beautiful in a single day, but I stretched it into two. 

Maggie writes about her life, her divorce, her children, and her work with such unflinching honesty. I was so stunned by her prose that I stopped every few paragraphs to read her words aloud to my boyfriend.

I resonated so deeply with her experiences that I wanted to call Maggie and shout, “Me too, Maggie, Me too!” I devoured every word, and when I finished, I squeezed the book to… show more.

This book is about a woman who thought she’d married and could make a home with her forever man except, over time, he stopped seeing and supporting her.

As they grew from couple to family, she lost her sense of self, eventually realizing how lonely and lost she was, finally swimming back to the surface all while clinging to her kids and her words. It’s a book about the craft of writing, about universal themes—relationships, compromise, identity—that are woven through the pages.

Like my memoir, Smith writes in short chapters; my favorite ones were the unanswerable questions, which… show more.