Collecting the fragments
Review of "You Could Make This Place Beautiful" by Maggie Smith.
On the first page of her recently published memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith says, “I want to be clear about something: This isn’t a tell-all.” Rather, she describes the book as more like a “tell-some” or a “tell-mine” or a “find-mine.” Yet the “mine” keeps changing, she says, “because I keep changing.”
The core narrative of the book concerns the viral success of Smith’s poem “Good Bones” (from which her memoir’s title is taken), her discovery of her husband’s infidelity and their painful divorce, as well as the larger truths that all those things revealed about the division of labour in marriage and the value of women’s work in society. But she hesitates even to call the book a memoir, because a memoir implies it’s all past and done with. “I’m still living the story as I write it,” she says – finding and telling at the same time. And she invites her readers to join her in the finding and telling process.
This process is messy. Smith does not adhere to the adage sometimes imposed on memoirists to write from their scars, not their wounds (in other words, make sure everything is healed over before telling your story). She lets the rough edges show. She vents anger over her ex-husband’s decision to move 500 miles away from their children; then she goes back and analyzes her decision to let that part stand: “I thought about removing it… I let it stand because I’m trying to tell you the truth. My truth.” Smith acknowledges that she hasn’t arrived at full resolution yet: while there is progress, new insight and rediscovered joy, there is also lingering pain and confusion. “I wish to forgive,” she says, “so this is aspirational. I write this aspirationally…. By the time these pages are printed, by the time you’re reading this, may I be in a place of forgiveness.”
Questions still linger
The book is structured out of fragments. Some chapters are narratives that run for a few pages (about her early life with her husband, the births of her two children, her literary success, and her experience of single parenting through Covid, for example); others are just paragraphs or sentences. This fragmented structure reflects what she calls the “torn-to-pieces-hood” of her story as well as the complicated stop-and-start-ness of recovering from any major crisis.
A repeated theme is questions. A number of chapters have the heading A FRIEND SAYS EVERY BOOK BEGINS WITH AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION. “Then what is mine?” Smith asks. There are several of these questions – really more like aspirations, as she has said elsewhere – spread throughout the book:
how to forgive
how to grieve
how to remain myself
how to change
how to heal
how to make this place
beautiful
As I read, it occurred to me that I have those questions, and I believe readers of any faith expression or none at all could gain greater understanding of their own journey – however different it might be from Smith’s – on many of these pages. This is one of the things that makes Smith’s memoir so compelling: it is not just her story, brilliantly told; it’s also a generous gift. She asks her readers, “How can this story – this experience – be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool you can use… I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you. I need to trust that you’ll know what to do with it. Here, take it. Is this enough? This is my material.”
Readers who join Smith in her process of sifting through the scraps will appreciate her trust, the tools her story offers to anyone going through difficult life experiences and the beauty she makes from fragments of pain and grief.
