The cover of Maggie Smith’s memoir is stunning, and the words inside are no less striking. You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a memoir written by a poet, meaning readers will encounter sentences and images that you’ll need to read more than once, just to soak in the beauty (or “savor the flavor” as we say in our family). This is a memoir with an unconventional structure, a memoir that gives readers a glimpse inside to the end of Ms. Smith’s marriage and the beginning of what comes next.

From the book flap: “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.”

Here are a few of the passages, that for one reason or another, I marked with a highlighter and sticky note. Some of these passages are beautifully written. Some passages resonated with me, though on the surface it would seem Ms. Smith and I lead very different lives. But that’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading memoir — I learn about another person while also learning about myself, because it really is true — what we, as humans, have in common is so much more than our differences.

“How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves — all of our selves — wherever we go.
“Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.”

“Being married isn’t being two columns, standing so straight and tall on their own, they never touch. Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.”

“For most of my life, I’d been a planner — driven and organized in my work; wedded to a schedule as a parent. But both the divorce and the pandemic meant a loss of control. So many of the things I had planned for were no longer possible, and I had to let go. I loosened my white-knuckled grip on my life and instead of feeling panicked, I found myself being more playful, more spontaneous, less tethered to order for order’s sake.”

“What I want to remember about that time — and what I want my kids to remember — is unselfconscious joy, tenderness, and togetherness. I want them to remember that their mother was happy, not that she had dinner on the table at 6:00 every night, or that bedtime was always at 8:00. I want to remember all the things we did, not the things we weren’t able to do.
“Sometimes yes looks like reminding yourself of what is still possible.”

“I’ve wondered if I can even call this book a memoir. It’s not something that happened in the past that I’m recalling for you. It’s not a recollection, a retrospective, a reminiscence. I’m still living through this story as I write it. I’m finding mine, and telling it, but all the while, the mine is changing.”

“The way you’ll be remembered is the way you’re living now, I tell myself. If you don’t like it, change it.”

“I’ve tried to love them as if there is a right way. No, I’ve loved them without having to try at all, because I’m their mother, and the love is not work. Parenting is work: the cooking of meals, the washing of clothes, the tending of wounds, the taming of cowlicks, the helping with homework, the driving to soccer, the packing of lunches, the finding of missing things (water bottle lids, baseballs, library books, mittens), the consoling to sleep. The love? It’s not work.”

“How I picture it: We are nesting dolls, carrying all of our earlier selves inside us. I feel so full of the life I had before — the life I have already lived — how is there room for anything new?
“We feel and feel, and live and live, but somehow we’re never full. This life is elastic, impossibly elastic. There is always room for more experience. Our lives expand to accommodate anything.”

“ ‘Wish for more pain,’ a friend’s therapist advised, if you want to change. If you’re in enough pain, you won’t be able to continue living the way you’ve been living; you’ll have to do something differently. But be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it — and then what? Then the pain is yours. The pain is yours and it will change you.”

“Now I see the title as a call to action — a promise I’d made not only to this book, and to you, but to myself. A promise I intend to keep.” 

“I keep thinking that this story, this life, could’ve happened another way. In some parallel universe, maybe it did, but here it happened like this — or, rather, it’s happening like this. How will it end? I don’t know. Every ending is one of many possibilities, one of many unknowns. Every ending is secret until it happens.”

Please note: I am including a link to buy the book that I’m highlighting this week. If you use my link, I do make a small commission on your purchase at no additional cost to you. I am working with Bookshop.org which also sends a portion of the profit to support local, independent bookstores.