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Maggie Smith

You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir Hardcover – April 11, 2023

by Maggie Smith (Author)

4.5 1,021 ratings

Editors' pick Best Books of the Year So Far 2023

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“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.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Atria/One Signal Publishers
Publication date

April 11, 2023
Dimensions

6 x 1 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

1982185600
ISBN-13

978-1982185855
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Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.
Highlighted by 741 Kindle readers
Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home. I’m starring and underlining this fact for future reference.
Highlighted by 535 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Maggie Smith’s book is one of the most powerful memoirs I’ve ever read....This book makes me see the women in my life in a new light, not that they are different, but I am.”
—Kwame Alexander, Oprah Daily

“Rich in nuance and unrelenting in its honesty, Smith’s memoir is a bittersweet study in both grief and joy.”
—TIME

"This book is extraordinary."
—Ann Patchett

"A beautiful book...stunning."
—Oprah Daily

"A triumph"
—Mary Louise Kelly, NPR

"Smith turns to prose to chronicle the end of her marriage and the hard, beautiful work of loving and valuing herself."
—People

"Sparkling & brilliant. Maggie was able to put into words things I’ve always felt as a writer and a human."
—Daisy Perez, CBS Mornings

"[An] elliptical, inquisitive book"
—Buzzfeed

"This book is a gift."
—Leslie Jamison, bestselling author of The Empathy Exams

"Beautifully written... Smith should be just as celebrated for her prose."
—Town and Country

"Incredibly relatable...At turns devastating and darkly funny."
—Columbus Monthly

“You Could Make This Place Beautiful is about recognizing your own worth in your relationship, and in the world.”
—Slate

"A poet’s memoir... [Smith] has an uncanny ability to boil down giant ideas into tiny, dense sentences that are both playful and heartbreaking."
—Shondaland

"An anatomy of....an artist stepping into her own light, of a mother working out how to create a loving family on her own."
—BOMB

"Smith’s prose is as warm and welcoming as her poetry."
—Chicago Review of Books

"Smith opens her heart like a book, dog-earing moments both painful and joyous...Smith's conjuring of beauty through pain and her special blend of vulnerability and encouragement go down like a healing tonic.”
—Booklist (starred review)

"You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a sparklingly brilliant memoir-in-vignettes that only Maggie Smith could write. Yet this is a book for everyone—who among us has never had our world upended by the loss of a relationship? Maggie Smith’s powerful mastery of language, and amazing ability to portray life in all its rich messiness, is on full display in this bold, brutally candid, and yes, beautiful, book.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts

“In this lightning bolt of a debut memoir, Maggie Smith gives us the truth of healing in form as much as story: getting through is no pretty, linear narrative. It’s one chapter forward and five chapters back. You Could Make This Place Beautiful gave me back a part of myself I thought was gone for good: the knowledge that beauty isn’t something out there to find. It’s in us.”
—Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

“Listen, you may not need me to tell you what you already know about the shining star that is Maggie Smith, but you can certainly add me to the chorus of those singing her praises about You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Among her singular gifts as a writer are the way she swiftly brings her poetry to her prose; her willingness to show up to the page with aspirational levels of vulnerability, grace, and joy; and a clarity of heart amid the heartbreak that together makes this a moving and gorgeous must read.
—Elizabeth Crane, author of This Story Will Change

“When personal tragedy strikes us, first we have to survive, then we have to begin healing. This exquisite book will help you do both. Reading Smith's memoir, I laughed and gasped and ugly-cried and somehow began to process ten years of my own pent-up, frozen grief. This book is nothing less than a cathartic miracle.”
—Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love

About the Author

Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1982185856
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atria/One Signal Publishers (April 11, 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982185600
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982185855
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.03 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,170 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16 in Motherhood (Books)
- #118 in Memoirs (Books)
- #133 in Personal Transformation Self-Help

Customer Reviews:
4.5 1,021 ratings

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Maggie Smith

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Maggie Smith is the author of several books, including Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017) and the national bestsellers Goldenrod (One Signal/Simon&Schuster, July 2021) and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (One Signal/Simon & Schuster, 2020).Her debut picture book for children, My Thoughts Have Wings, illustrated by Leanne Hatch, is forthcoming from Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins in 2024.

Smith's poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Image, the Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals and anthologies. In 2016 her poem "Good Bones" went viral internationally; since then it has been translated into nearly a dozen languages and featured on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary. Smith has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She can be found online at www.maggiesmithpoet.com and on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

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1,021 global ratings

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Annie

I Know a Better Book about Divorce, Heartbreak.

Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2023

Verified Purchase

Eight years ago my husband of nearly 45 years up and left me for a much younger work colleague after months of marriage counseling. I am an accomplished professional woman, the major money earner in our family, yet I really identified with this line from You Could Make this Place Beautiful: "What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time. I would have done it for longer if he’d let me." I wanted my children to continue to have a family in their adult lives. But I imprisoned myself for a time in a life that was miserable, as did Smith. My post-divorce life is wonderful, splendid, fully happy.

So I found much to value in this book, but there is one that offered me personally so much more insight, Florence William's Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, which takes a scientific approach to understanding the bodily feelings of panic, fear, anxiety, fragility divorce raises in women. A strong, athletic woman, I suddenly felt like I was living in a body that felt like an eggshell. I had panic attacks for the first time. in my life. My responses were largely physical. Through searching for scientific reasons for her unexpected physical reactions to abandonment, Williams helped me understand the connections between emotions and bodily responses. Her book is more nuanced and, while personal, is not just about her and her experiences. It is more universal. I highly recommend it.

10 people found this helpful

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mkb

Great read, but....

Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2023

Verified Purchase

I enjoyed, even envied, Smith's writing, and I admire and respect her as an author and single mom raising two children after a protracted, painful divorce. But I finished her book not liking her as a person. While appearing to be forthcoming, she's markedly hidden. Yes, she acknowledges her complicity in becoming smaller and smaller in her marriage, yet she doesn't own her emotional absence. You glean from her sobbing in the counselor's office and her throwing a glass of water at her husband that she's capable of moments of drama, but what is her everyday emotional landscape? Anyone who listens to music non-stop - as she readily admits - tunes out much of the world in and around her. Her choices of what to reveal about herself are, for the most part, self-serving. I experience her as controlled and controlling.

15 people found this helpful

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C. Simmons

stunning

Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2023

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This is an absolutely staggeringly, heartbreaking work. The sheer pain in it took my breath away. I had to put it down to catch my breath & remember it’s not me. Maggie has delivered an astonishing thing. - vulnerability, pain, heartache, tragedy - and beauty. I’m gobsmacked by the gorgeousness of the prose as she deals with her own heart shattering. Truly I hope this book somehow pays off her mortgage. May the addresser & the addressee sleep on too hot pillows for eternity.

3 people found this helpful

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Len G.

It's all good!

Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2023

Verified Purchase

I needed this book for a class I was taking.

Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2023

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Loved every page. Went through a painful divorce, and this book along with Keep Moving helped me so much.

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Pat Materka

Sensitive insightful writing

Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2023

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I'll be watching this author.

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2023

Verified Purchase

Maggie Smith’s poetic honesty and hospitality calls us home to the “heart of the heart.” And we dare to believe for ourselves too—beautiful.

Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2023

Verified Purchase

Stunning book that will stick with you long after you finish it.

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Mrs R.

Peace...acceptance

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 9, 2023

Verified Purchase

My 1st marriage broke up with the line ' you are needy and dependent and I can no longer take care of you'. It took 2 years to learn that his truth was really his gayness. A relief that in reality it wasn't me...but so much sadness for him that he lost so many years being someone he wasn't. A blessing that I/we had this incredible daughter... Sadness for her when he died so young (51) because she was/is a real 'daddys girl '.
He and I had our time.... I have happy memories from the time we were together...sad and happy memories once the dust settled.
The man I'm married to now is a result of lessons learned.

4 people found this helpful

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