July Memoir of the Month: You Could Make This Place Beautiful
Poet Maggie Smith finds the beauty in life after a divorce she never wanted.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful (2023)
by Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith’s memoir compares her divorce to a play, with characters, an inciting incident, and a denouement. Smith plays The Finder, and the inciting incident — the incident that sets her on the narrative journey — happens after her husband returns from a business trip.
One could argue the incident happened before this, the night Meryl Streep reads Smith’s poem at the Academy of American Poets’ annual gala (the end of that poem is below). The poem goes viral, changing her life’s trajectory:
Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
If you gathered every sentence Smith wrote about her husband in this memoir, they would take up a few pages at most. And yet, because of Smith’s eloquent and brilliant storytelling, we come away knowing him all too well.
Smith is the primary caregiver for two young children, and her husband is the breadwinner. Like many writers with small children, she wrote in those brief, stolen moments during naps and preschool. When the poem goes viral, the demands of her work grow. She is offered speaking engagements. She travels. She hosts workshops.
The husband does not celebrate his wife’s achievements. One time, when she is traveling for work, her son develops a fever. Her husband calls, unable to care for his own child. She ends up flying back across the country. By the time she gets home, her son has recovered, but one thing hasn’t changed. Her husband clearly wants to keep their established division of labor.
Smith writes about the spreadsheet. You know the one — the one with his duties in one column and hers in the other. But, as we all know, the spreadsheet is pointless. The spreadsheet offers no proof, no conclusion, and no resolution to the division of labor because the division of labor is not based on rational thought or fairness of any kind.
One of my close friend’s husbands tried to get out of driving their daughter to a birthday party because he, “had the dogs all day.” He would put “having the dogs” in his column when she and I both know that’s not a thing. Walking the dogs, maybe, but having the dogs? He also puts “getting the mail” in his imaginary column. Mind you, the mailbox is at the end of a very short driveway.
He knows neither of these tasks should be counted, but the division of labor is not fact-based. The division of labor is established through emotion. It is based on traditional gender roles. Labor assignments have nothing to do with how much work is required to complete the task. Work is never evenly distributed, so don’t even ask.
At a point well into the book, Smith asks herself why every therapy session they attend focuses on his needs. She eventually realizes that her marriage probably wouldn’t have lasted even without her career success.
Smith’s writing is beautiful and her story is brutally honest. I highly recommend this book!