Few books reach that special place of I need to read this again right this minute. Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful is one of those special books.
In the memoir, Smith shows us her life bit by bit. The story is one of recovery, of regaining a sense of self, of reclaiming her life after her contentious divorce.
It’s a story of love, motherhood, feminism and empowerment at the same time it’s a story of heartbreak, betrayal and the multiple ways people allow themselves to be reduced to less than their partners in an attempt to make relationships work.
It’s a story of moving on.
Unlike most memoirs which serve as a long look back, Smith’s story is one she’s living now.
When I saw this book, I thought it was by the other Maggie Smith. The English Maggie Smith. I’d heard of the American poet Maggie Smith because of her poem Good Bones, but she’s not who immediately came to my mind.
I’m so glad I love Maggie Smith the actor so much because now I have a new Maggie Smith to love.
Smith’s memoir is a masterclass in story telling and wordsmithing. The prose is lyrical and emotional. Readers will feel the gamut of emotions as they go with Smith in her journey to finding her footing in a life different from what she imagined.
Thank you NetGalley and Atria Publishing for the opportunity to review an advance copy of You Could Make This Place Beautiful. I loved it!

Highly recommend

Blown away with how raw and real this book is. Smith does such a fabulous job writing about her life that I was immediately drawn in and invested in what would happen with her marriage and children and jobs. I thought the length was perfect. The chapters flowed so well.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. 5+ stars!

I got chills when I read about Meryl Streep reading Good Bones at Lincoln Center. I felt the sting of the moment of the postcard, the pinecone, the notebook. I felt that first meeting in class, the play, being in your 20's. The love. I grieved alongside her reading about the Tupperware. The knowing of Violet, the calm and the cry of Rhett. I knew this book was going to be beautiful, but it will stay with me for a very long time as I navigate my own womanhood.

This "tell-mine" (love that) is composed of vignettes, poems and questions. It's such a beautiful recount of her marriage, divorce, motherhood, womanhood, art, working and what that all means — how she (and we) are all tied together from present and past selves. Where/when/why/how does it start and where/when/why/how does it end? Who decided? Those questions have so many answers, or maybe they don't.

What I think is the most important aspect of this book is a woman telling her story. We need more women sharing what they know, the beauty and the pain and the fucked of it all. It's so vital, so relatable and honestly it makes me feel less anxious about all the things that boil and fester within me: all the ways I've been absolutely shattered but have to keep going, the way I absorb love like a sponge, the way I give love like I could lose it at any moment, the way I retreat and crave space, romantic and platonic love and how many times I've fallen in love with different people and why, the friendships that feel different now than they did when I was younger, how I go back and forth between wanting to start a family and not wanting to, the way I take on what I do in my relationship and in my house, what I know and what I don't know anything about. It's all wrapped up in me and I'm only (nearly) 32. I just got married, I just lost the house and rebuilt the house. What the hell is to come? A lot. This book made me feel less afraid of the unknown because I'm always going to be mine, and that's certain. We're made of so much. It's important to keep discovering.

Anyway, I'm ruminating. 🐄

Thank you so much for this, @maggiesmithpoet. You've made this place more beautiful. Please come to Boston on a book tour so I can meet you in person and buy a physical copy of your book and say thanks, okay?! Thank you @netgalley and @atriabooks. Don't miss this one, it's got good bones... lovely bones. 🌸 Scheduled for release this April.

Heartbreaking and hopeful, Maggie Smith writes about her divorce and her life with 2 kids in the aftermath during the pandemic.

Let me start off by saying - I give Maggie Smith's You Could Make This Place Beautiful five stars. I would give it ten stars, if I could. Infinite stars. To read this book while I’m staring down the barrel of 40 and a year into my own brutal and never-ending divorce while being a single, working mother to two young children is an experience I will quite frankly never forget.

How I annotated this book! How I noted over and over again exactly how this deeply personal experience could have so many universal threads. The lyrical poetry in Maggie’s prose here is to be expected but there is something so stunning about her generosity. She is revealing layer after layer of herself and offering anyone in similar shoes the opportunity to feel seen. This is a deeply profound and moving memoir that attempts to ask the question "how did we get here?", all while knowing there are both no answers and a million answers.

I will revisit this book again and again, if only to remind myself that I'm not alone, I will be okay, and every season will pass.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria for the ARC.

Let me preface this review with acknowledgement of the sheer beauty of this prose. As with her other works, Maggie Smith is a gifted wordsmith who lays bare the best & worst moments of her life in both subtle & uninhibited ways. I appreciate this work — which I hesitate to call memoir for the same reasons she posits in the book — for all it says & does with a sort of blunt knife in the face of learning to survive.

That all said I did find parts whose presence in publication do not seem to fit with the mystery she repeatedly seems keen on exploring. I can buy into Mary Oliver’s notion of telling about the astonishment of all (namely & especially the “wild things” in our lives.) However, telling is different than publishing, and I found myself becoming distant at parts that I think I would have a difficult time reading post-publication as opposed to post-journal reading if I were her children — even if it was years after publication. Perhaps that is not how they will perceive it at all — if they even read it — and I’m projecting as a reader with sensitivities toward my own parents. It just felt like even with the explicit absence of certain memories, there were still other moments that felt too sacred for me & others who will consume this book to not only read, but, more importantly, be able to take with us. It is for this reason that I do think this work will make a fascinating read in the study of memoir, inspiring what is not a question of “could,” but rather a matter of “WILL make this place beautiful” for years to come.

I’m grateful to NetGalley & Atria Books for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Wonderful book! I was sucked in by the cover alone but really enjoyed this book! Would recommend to anyone.

Title refers to the last line of Smith's poem: Good Bones.

The epigraph of the book is from Emily Dickinson: I am out with lanterns looking for myself.
Smith takes us along as she looks at the devolution of her marriage alongside the rise of her artistic success.
She does this by circling back to: a friend says that every book begins with an unanswerable question, then what is mine. It is beautifully written.

I went into this thinking it was Maggie Smith the actress…not the poet LOL. I was very confused at first. But that being said…I actually enjoyed the book. I thought it was well written & relatable.

I do apologize to the other readers, but I could not get into this book. First, it wasn't what I expected, and although I really tried to feel what the author was trying to express, I just couldn't get past the words to the emotion.
I thank NetGalley for the advance read.

This is a wonderful vignette style memoir. I loved the nuances and personal feelings Maggie Smith includes in this intimate portrait of her life post divorce.

Maggie Smith is a gorgeous wordsmith, and I jumped at the opportunity to read an ARC of her upcoming memoir (thanks to Simon & Schuster and Netgalley). Like many others, I initially came to Smith's work through her poem "Good Bones," and have followed her since. Her poetry combines a thoughtful, focused recognition of the flashing beauty to be found in ordinary moments with sharp bursts of wonderful, sardonic humor.

Her more recent book of short, inspirational notes and quotes, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, veered into slightly more sentimental, self-help territory, which was less compelling to me as reader, but the author was going through a divorce and, according to the jacket copy, these little short notes and quotes helped pull her through tough days. Fair enough.

Now we have "You Could Make this Place Beautiful," pitched as a memoir, but really something closer to an expanded version of Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, as it is comprised of fairly short episodes and meditations, again revolving around the author's divorce.

In this book, Smith puts enormous energy and heart towards using her powers for good—she attempts to spin straw into gold, to metaphorize the heck out of her truly lousy experiences, to turn lemons into lemonade, and to work over and over the various elements of her own story to try to find the language to contain and even transform her memories and experience into something that could still be meaningful for her and her children and, dare I say it, perhaps even beautiful.

As Smith notes, the first drafts of the book were written during and in the immediate aftermath of a drawn-out divorce proceeding. Perhaps the memoir would have benefitted from a bit more time and perspective. An argument can be made that watching a person struggle through tough stuff can be instructive, but I do think that real wisdom usually emerges once a person is safely on dry land and not in the middle of the howling storm lashing herself to the mast.

I don’t want to niggle, but here’s my problem. Smith is an extremely nice woman, born and raised in Ohio, so all the raw, righteous, bitter fury that any woman in her position would certainly feel ends up squeezed through that wretched machine, the Midwestern woman’s internal self-deprecator, which has an uncanny way of redirecting anger into more acceptable, containable, emotions such as sadness and sorrow. Even smart, thoughtful, feminist Smith stares at the wreckage of her marriage in wide-eyed disbelief, seeming to sadly ask the reader: “Can you even believe it? Can you even believe what this guy did to me and his children? How he stomped on our hearts?”

Look, like most middle-aged women, I have spent many hours of my life listening to my intelligent, thoughtful friends—who have expended years of their lives doing most of the emotional labor in their relationships and living with husbands that often act like privileged man-babies—bewail their utter shock at the really crappy things that these same men do and say during breakups. And yes, I surely can believe it. But, like Smith’s ex-husband—who continually implied that her writing was not real work, who resented her success and gave her a hard time when she went out of town to give readings, who called her back early from trips for the most inconsequential of reasons—most of these guys showed their stripes long before the divorce.

My own sense is that in another five years, Smith will feel nothing but gratitude to be out of this marriage, as tough as this moment may be. In the meantime, more power to her for trying to turn a difficult period in her life into prose.

I was so excited to get a chance to read an ARC of this title, because, like many folks, I became a fan of Maggie Smith's poetry as "Good Bones" went viral and her social media posts helped us all "keep moving" during the pandemic. She even got me into Rhett Miller's music long after I'd left off listening to the Old 97s.

I haven't been through a divorce, although there have been some experiences that came close, and this deeply personal and poetic memoir brought up some painful memories. But it also made me start noticing and narrating more of the little beautiful moments of every day (especially watching birds), so I think it was well worth the time, And because I'm totally a creepy armchair detective, I tracked down the whereabouts of the manchild ex-husband, and I'll just say that I look forward to when his next ex-wife writes a book about the aftermath of him in her life.

A couple of my many highlights:

"...there are no Irish exits from one's own head"

"In every relationship, she said, there are the things that connect us--things we have in common, things we like about each other. But the contract is like a secret handshake under the table. It's subconscious. It often has to do with the wounds we carry with us from childhood, our attachments, our traumas, even the ones we haven't articulated to ourselves."

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

We were pleased to share this title at our live Spring Book Preview event for the Modern Mrs Darcy and What Should I Read Next communities on January 10, 2023, when 1200 readers attended live and twice that many watched the replay in the following week. The PDF from that event is attached. Long story short: much like Keep Moving, this work is beautiful, poignant, and achingly sad.

Simply gorgeous writing about the dissolution of a marriage and what comes after. Full of rumination about self-identity, social norms, gender roles, and love.

Maggie Smith’s memoir is very compelling. There are lovely vignettes and passages interspersed with quotes to set the scene. The only drawback for me was the refrain of “reader, I’m not going to tell you this” - I found it distracting and unnecessary. Still, this is an engaging read I would recommend to anyone. 4.5 stars.

Thank you very much to Atria and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy.

Thank you to Maggie Smith, Atria Books, Atria/One Signal Publishers, and Netgalley for a free advanced reader copy of "You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir" for an honest review.

I freely and admit that the first poem my kids see every year is the youtube version of "Good Bones," because it gets them into the right headspace for talking about poetry and thinking about it, both on the page and as an expression of so much wider and deeper. I jumped at this title the second I saw it, before I was even entirely sure what kind of non-fiction/memoir it was, only know it was of "Good Bones" and by Maggie Smith.

This book blew every expectation I had out of the water. I will be raving about this memoir to anyone and everyone who will listen. Her magical way of twining self, metaphor, poetry, snippets, and narrative arcing, while talking about the self currently, past, and as a separate entity was amazing. I was stunned the whole way through, staying up hours each night just devouring section after section. I feel like this book needs to be used to help aside poetry everywhere, to talk about how prose is poetic as well, even when the text doesn't specifically "look" like a poem.

The greatest deal of trusted vulnerability was put into these pages, and I felt like I was being gifted the grace to watching someone learn to hurt, be angry, heal, forgive, and continue to question how they could make their own self beautiful again. I deeply appreciated the authorial choices about protecting her child and her new love interest, being very clear about how this book was about dealing with a specific and significant piece of her past/present. I will be rereading this, buying it for my classroom, and for others.

Myself a woman,
married, with young kids, this book
reads like a thriller.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️🌟

I write haiku reviews on Instagram, but if you’d like more feedback, I’m happy to provide it!

Not only is this book so easy to read in small snippets of time but the lyrical vignettes are also heavy hitters that have me nodding along in agreement with every page. @maggiesmithpoet nuanced writing encompasses what is true but also embraces the possibilities of the future.⁣
⁣
“We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside of us. We take ourselves- all of our selves- wherever we go."⁣
⁣
Maggie Smith's writing is relatable and has the perfect balance of being a reminder of who we are and who we can still become while also celebrating the struggles and the joys of the messy in-between.
⁣
I know it is still 2022, but is it possible to already have a favorite book list of 2023?? Because, so far, this one is making the list! Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for my gifted review copies.

Poet Maggie Smith’s beautifully written memoir is about “a woman coming home to herself,” coming to terms with the very difficult breakup of her marriage. A lot of this story is difficult and sad, but it is also one of triumph, as we follow Smith’s slow, steady transformation from a woman lost, disillusioned, and bereft to one who is strong, happy, and fulfilled. The title comes from the final line of Maggie Smith’s most famous poem, “Good Bones”:

“ . . . 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.”

The story of Smith’s journey “home” is brilliantly related through an inventive structure that includes the presentation of actual events, anecdotes, quotes, notes on the “characters” (as though from the point of view of an omniscient narrator), metaphors that stop you in your readerly tracks, as well discussions of form and metaphor and art. Smith discusses memoir as both the art of memory and the art of curation, and she distinguishes between narrative arc as taught in school vs. lived experience. “Plot is what happened, and what happened is one thing. What the book—the life—is about is another thing entirely.” “It’s a mistake to think of one’s life as plot,” she writes, “to think of the events of one’s life as events in a story. It’s a mistake. And yet, there’s foreshadowing everywhere, foreshadowing I would’ve seen myself if I had been watching a play or reading a novel, not living a life.”

Smith’s transformation, and our understanding, is achieved through reiteration and various juxtapositions of events, reflection, and soul-searching. For her, the process of writing is the method by which self-exploration and meaning-making happen. She unpacks the truth, bit by bit, as though opening a series of nesting dolls, one after another after another. And like nesting dolls, Smith writes, we carry all of our earlier selves inside us. The writing is just gorgeous throughout. I challenge anyone to read this book without highlighting, underlining, or penciling asterisks and exclamation points in the margins.

Smith often writes that she’s trying to tell the truth, to both herself and the reader. But at the same time, she acknowledges that she is not telling us everything. Some of it is hers alone. This can be a little frustrating to the reader. After all, we know the difference between memoir and exhaustive autobiography. We accept whatever and how much the writer wants to tell, but perhaps don’t want to be reminded that we’re not getting the whole story. And some may be, at first, put off by the seeming redundancies in the narrative. However, I’ve come to see these as necessary to revelation, to the writer’s unfolding self-realization. Because “you never step in the same river twice.” Because every time you look back on an event, you’re a different person doing the looking. And that’s all part of the very complex story — and meaning — of a life.

Best of all, Smith gives us all a way of looking at our own lives with a new or renewed appreciation and understanding, to see the beauty in every life. She teaches us to recognize the constant interplay between art and life, how each one informs the other. “Life, like a poem, is a series of choices,” Smith reminds us. And, as she so expertly puts it: “If we knew nothing of jays or wrens or sparrows, we’d believe the trees were singing, as if each tree has its own song. The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful.”

Thank you to Atria/One Signal Publishers and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Maggie Smith is a beautiful writer. Her poetry in particular is so precise and exacting, it can take my breath away.
It’s hard to review this book because of how personal it is. She tackled the memoir in an interesting way, and some of the vignettes were stunning. Towards the end it got fairly repetitive and not every vignette felt necessary for the overall narrative.
The best parts provided commentary on invisible labor and the inequitable division of household tasks. I would love to have heard her develop these ideas in a more universal way. I do realize that a memoir isn’t the best form for that though