You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith - Review
by Oona Metz, founder of Oona Metz, LICSW, Therapist
Maggie Smith’s divorce memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, is a welcome respite in a world in which acrimonious celebrity divorces make front page headlines. Using lyrical prose, Smith explores the nuances of marriage, motherhood, divorce and grief in her New York Times bestseller. While Smith keeps her chapters short—sometimes just a line or two—her exploration of her marriage and its demise runs deep. As a therapist working with women navigating divorce, it is a relief to find a divorce memoir as honest and relatable as this one. So many parts of her narrative are my patients’ stories, my story, and perhaps, your story too.
Smith, a celebrated poet, is the author of several books of poems including Good Bones and Goldenrod. She is also the author of Keep Moving, a collection of daily inspirational Twitter posts she wrote during her divorce. Smith became a social media hit when her 2016 poem Good Bones went viral. In Good Bones, she muses on the idea that life can be both good and bad, like a “real shithole” of a house that has “good bones.” In both poetry and prose, Smith reveals her resilience and optimism.
Early on, Smith warns the reader that this book is not a “tell-all” but a “tell-mine.” While there are moments we see her anger, most palpably when the father of her children moves 500 miles away to be with his girlfriend (and affair partner), Smith’s book is powered more by curiosity than anger. As life becomes challenging and complex, Smith brings us into her nuanced inner experience with her raw, candid vignettes. Full of both vulnerability and strength, Smith creates beauty and inspiration from the wreckage of her marriage. Through her experience we see both the poignant, heartbreaking moments and the mundane but satisfyingly relatable ones—ingredients that combine to make a meaningful life.
Smith’s marriage began a slow descent towards divorce when her children were born and household expectations became even more gendered. Smith’s husband worked at a job outside the home while Smith, a poet and editor, freelanced and provided the bulk of the caregiving. The dynamic between them evolved into one in which his work was valued and her work was considered an intrusion into their home running smoothly. Slowly, over time, her sense of self eroded, yet she maintained hope their marriage would improve.
Even though there has been progress towards more equality in caretaking, Smith and her husband’s gendered family roles are not unusual. I frequently see those roles factoring into the decision to divorce as the women in my practice often describe feeling that their husbands were more like additional children than equal partners. Although women in the US now enjoy higher incomes and greater professional opportunities than at any point in our history, the institution of heterosexual marriage has been slow to catch up. Smith explains that she thought her marriage would be different from her parents’ generation—more progressive, more equal, and yet, the division of labor told a different story. Smith and her husband made a bargain that worked well enough until Smith’s writing gained momentum.
The balance that Smith had so carefully crafted at home began to unravel when her poem Good Bones went viral and her husband seemed more threatened than celebratory. “One night, lying next to me in bed, my husband told me I was famous. He said it quietly in the dark. In his inflection, I heard sadness.” Returning from a writing conference to a cold, silent husband she writes, “I didn’t feel missed as a person. I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post.” Here, Smith puts words to the experience of so many mothers who are expected to do it all—work, childcare, household duties—and are criticized when they can’t. Or won’t. I have seen countless heterosexual marriages begin to crumble when (because?) the woman’s career requires more attention outside the home. While Smith attended a writing conference in Florida, she worried about her husband being home with the kids. “He was ‘covering for me,’ as if I were a coworker who’d gone on vacation and left my cubicle-neighbor with all my tasks while I was away.”
Smith later discovers her husband is having an affair which propels their descent towards divorce into overdrive. She manages to avoid divulging all the gory details, yet still delivers an honest account of her thoughts and feelings during that wrenching period. Marital therapy, separation, shared custody, and legal battles ensue, and we are brought in at every turn to her experience without feeling voyeuristic. While Smith has packed her memoir with specific details of the breakdown of her marriage and the strain of her divorce, she stays true to the “tell-mine” narrative and remains conscious of her children as future readers. Like the women I see in my practice, she is thoughtful about how to balance a life that makes her children happy with a life that is meaningful to her.
Smith describes in great detail the ways in which her divorce impacted her physically and emotionally: “I cried (and cried and cried and cried). I woke up in the middle of the night terrified, my heart racing. I whittled myself down, losing more than twenty pounds…” Divorce attorneys suggest divorce is primarily a business deal, but anyone who has been through one knows that divorce is much more than a financial transaction. In fact, The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, developed by two psychiatrists, identifies divorce as the second most stressful life transition, second only to death of a spouse. According to this scale, divorce is more stressful than jail time, death of a close family member, or personal injury.
Despite all the pain, heartache and sleepless nights, Smith does not shy away from the relief and optimism that build once the legal aspects of her divorce are behind her. Near the end of the book she reflects, “…the more time passed, the less I hurt. The less I hurt, the more I was able to see how beautiful, how full, my life was. I felt myself smiling as I walked in my neighborhood.” Smith provides us with countless sweet moments with her children, from her son hiding love notes around the house to her teenage daughter adding the Rainbow Connection to their shared playlist after watching the Muppet movie together.
The good news about divorce for Smith and women like her is that women tend to fare well psychologically after divorce and often report feeling happier out of the marriage than in it. Women are uniquely adept at seeking emotional support and are more likely to become active participants in their own recovery. There is a saying among professionals who work with divorcing clients that “women heal, and men replace.” In addition to being heartbreaking and stressful, divorce also offers a unique opportunity for women to grow, and often, to thrive. Like Smith, many women find that after divorce, they too can Make This Place Beautiful.
Maggie Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Goldenrod, Keep Moving, Good Bones, and other books of poetry and prose. Smith’s poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
Oona Metz is a psychotherapist near Boston, Massachusetts who specializes in treating women navigating divorce. In addition to her practice, she speaks on divorce and group therapy locally and nationally and has written about divorce for Cognoscenti/WBUR. You can find her at www.oonametz.com.
This article was originally published here.
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