You Could Make This Place Beautiful

A Memoir

By: Maggie Smith

Narrated by: Maggie Smith

Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NPR Best Book of the Year • Time Best Book of the Year • Oprah Daily Best Memoir of the Year

“A bittersweet study in both grief and joy.” ­—Time

“A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes” (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author) that explores coming of age in your middle age—from the bestselling poet and author of Keep Moving.

“Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.”

In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman’s personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is “extraordinary” (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.

©2023 Maggie Smith. All rights reserved. (P)2023 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Rhythmic storytelling

I’ve never read a memoir like this one by Maggie Smith. It unfolds, doubled back, echoes, reaffirms, and returns to itself most beautifully. As a person who has been married for decades, I understand so much in this book. I recommend.

Truth

« Pain changes us. » I know this and so much in this beautiful, painful and hopeful
memoir to be true. Thank you, Maggie Smith for writing this. Reader, this is line nothing you’ve ever read before or will ever read again. I think I will start it again, soon.

Beautifully written

A memoir like no other that I’ve read on relationships. Thank you Maggie for helping many of us caregivers.

I Could Read This Book Over and Over

I love to read books about overcoming adversity, struggling through grievous situations. It's even better when the heroine, yes, HEROINE, comes out on the other side with great takeaways that stay with you well beyond the span of the book.

Once I started reading this book, I couldn't put it down. I didn't want it to end. And, now that it's over, I already want to read it again.

When a vicious betrayal upends her life, Smith's finds a way forward. Surviving such pain could be trite in the hands of a lesser writer, but Smith's a masterful storyteller.

Smith's grace-under-pressure demeanor offers intelligence, wit and stoicism as she reclaims her life in this intimate and emotional journey. I doubt there's a woman out there who can't relate. I cheered for her every step of the way, and she didn't disappoint.

It wasn't revenge, posturing and rancor that won, it was a creative reframe of life, strengths, and life lessons that made the outcome so uplifting and deeply satisfying.

Beautiful, relatable, profound

A story written with such grace, candor and quiet humor that you feel you know the author intimately, even though she doesn’t lay out every detail or run through every event line-by-line. The story doesn’t have a triumph-through-adversity arc; it is more like thought and rumination, circling, recursively touching on themes. l loved this shimmering, beautiful memoir.

Beautiful

I would read anything she wrote. Beautiful writing, beautiful telling of a difficult story.

Loved It

I loved the book. It was just what I needed at the perfect time in my life.

Excruciatingly beautiful!

The parallel between my story and hers is similar but not. However, somehow through exquisite articulation, Maggie expressed painful truths. Truths that I needed to marinade within. I respect what she shared and didn’t. The narration is exactly how it should be. I feel blessed to have experienced this amazing book. Thank you M for recommending this read!!

Great for my soul

I read this at the perfect time of my life!! It is a must read if you are going through a divorce or have gone through divorce!!

Beautifully Written

Anyone who has loved and lost and managed to live through it, recognizing the power they received on the other side, will be able to relate and, I assume, enjoy it as I did.

I was disappointed by the audio production; long pauses with some distortion made me reach to my phone, thinking something had gone wrong with my device. No. Just post-production editing. All in all, it is an enjoyable listen, and I recommend it