If you’re lucky and had great parents, you come from a place of optimism and possibilities. Like the Little Engine Who Could, you keep on chugging whatever the circumstances are. Divorce is rarely an expectation, never something wished for as a child or an adult, because you’re not a quitter or anyone who wants a family split. One thing is certain, if you’ve experienced divorce, you can connect with other people’s similar experiences and feelings about it. It’s a bridge of commonality that spans differences such as who you hated and who you loved in the last election, what kind of music is best, or whether you believe God exists or not. Poet and author Maggie Smith’s book You Could Make this Place Beautiful: A Memoir surely resonates with many as it is a series of vignettes about her thoughts and experiences going through a divorce as a mom of two and a serious writer. It is a poignant, humorous look at a painful time, that in the hands of a poet, deftly lays bare the human and social condition of our time.
The title of Smith’s book comes from the last few lines of her viral poem “Good Bones,”
“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.” It illustrates bad experiences are a part of life, and parents sometimes walk a tightrope of balancing candor and honesty, while leaving a child’s sense of optimism and wonder intact, made all the more challenging by the parent’s simultaneous processing and coping with their own pilgrimage through these darker aspects of their lives.
Smith describes her book, “I’ve wondered if I can even call this book a memoir. It’s not something that happened in the past that I’m recalling for you. It’s not a recollection, a retrospective, a reminiscence. I’m still living through this story as I write it. I’m finding mine, and telling it, but all the while, the mine is changing.” She talks about her relationship with her husband, “When my husband introduced me at the release party for my second book of poems, I was standing off to the side of the stage, my arm around our daughter, holding her close. As he said many kind things about me, I remember thinking, Huh. What he said about me and my writing in public felt different than his attitude at home.”
As time goes on, she experiences intimations hard to forget, “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. I heard you’re not the same anymore, you’re gone somehow. ‘I’m not famous,’ I said. ‘I just wrote a famous poem.’ It wasn’t the same thing. I said it as a kind of apology, as reassurance, because I felt like I’d been accused of something. In my inflection, I hoped he’d hear I’m the same, I’m just me, I’m right here.”
Author Smith observes how work and success is valued by a society tipping the scales in favor of who earns the most money in a union. She remembers, “When I got good news related to my writing—a publication, a grant, an invitation—I sensed him [her husband] wince inwardly. So I stopped sharing good news. I made myself small, folded myself up origami tight. I canceled or declined upcoming events: See, I’ll do anything to make this marriage work. I gave up income and professional opportunities, but those sacrifices didn’t save my marriage.” Later she notes, “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.”
There is humor with the pain: “Under all comedy is tragedy. Under the boat, the water that holds us is dark and full of things we can’t see.“ Throughout her “uncoupling” she posts about a recurring thought, “@maggiesmithpoet: Photo essay that won’t happen: Divorced woman drives her rumpled c. 2005 wedding dress across the country and takes photos of it in various locations. It’s a metaphorical ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ sans stapled-on toupee and sunglasses, because the dead thing is the marriage.” She describes herself, “For years I’d joked that my body was basically a plant stand for my head. I lived from the neck up, but obviously I knew I needed the rest of it to get me around, to keep me going. I fed and watered myself now and then. The body is full of surprises, some wonderful, some terrible.”
Although this book covers a difficult period in the author’s life, it is engaging, funny, touching, and uplifting because going through difficult challenges with equanimity and humor can make a person stronger, helping to clarify what’s most important, able to embrace those closest to them, draw strength and joy from each other, and discover the satisfaction of living a life defined by one’s personal independence and vocational passions.
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