“This book is powered by questions, many of them unanswerable, so their fuel burns forever.”

Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith calls her memoir a “Tell-Mine” because she recognizes that in any personal memoir, the narrator can only speak from her own experience and perspective. And so she allows the reader to listen in as she processes the dissolution of her marriage – what led to it, what came from it, and the many thoughts, feelings, and memories that rise to the surface along the way.

Reading You Could Make This Place Beautiful was, for me, both validating and at the same time, a little traumatic because she so adeptly puts into words much of what I have felt over these last few years. I read this on my Kindle and I think I made more highlights and notes for this book than any other I have read.

“The Finder didn’t lose the future, only her knowledge about it. She lost the narrative. The Finder stopped knowing how to tell herself the story of her life. Where there had been a future, or at least the promise of one, there was now an ellipsis: dot dot dot.”

There is more to this book than the processing of a divorce. Maggie Smith is a poet. Her writing is lyrical and filled with metaphors and intentional pauses. The “chapters” are formatted at times like a journal, and other times like, well, a book of poetry. It is beautiful. Cathartic. Transformative.

Because she is a writer, she also processes the criticism (often heard directly from her own husband) that writing is not a “real job.” I struggle with that idea myself, but it honestly shocked me coming from her. Maggie Smith’s poetry has literally gone viral. She has multiple bestselling books. To me, her career is the very definition of “successful” – and yet she also fought against the attitude that writing is an indulgence. She shared this quote that I plan to print out and post somewhere prominent in my writing room:

“Writing is work that can hold up its head with all the other kinds of useful work out there in the world, and it is genuinely work.”
—Rebecca Solnit

If you have your own hard story to process, want the insider’s perspective on writing, or love beautiful prose, there’s something here for you, too.

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Content note for Christian readers: “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” contains some expletives and a few negative portrayals of Christians. And because it was not written by a Jesus-follower, it lacks the perspective of eternity that can ground trauma in a deeper kind of hope. That said, this book is raw, honest, and poignant, and I am adding more of Smith’s works to my TBR list.