You Could Make This Place Beautiful

A Memoir

By: Maggie Smith

Narrated by: Maggie Smith

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.

Critic reviews

"American poet Maggie Smith beautifully narrates her memoir of the end of her marriage and rediscovering herself as she picks up the pieces...Smith’s pacing makes each word and phrase more powerful. Her performance can be heartbreaking, but her narration is charming and poignant."

Beautifully written

Poetic writing and at many points insightful. Got tired of the repetitious whining. Cheered her growing strength and confidence

Raw, Heartfelt and Healing

This book was a true gift to listen to. Thank you for your beautiful narrated insights and for sharing your raw, heartfelt, heartbreaking, heart awakening, authentic story, Maggie Smith.

I went through a divorce around the same time frame as you, and you expressed thoughts and feelings that I couldn’t quite find the words for. You have lent me your words, language and images and they have helped me with another layer of healing. I am grateful to you for writing this book and I highly recommend it for those who are started a new chapter in their lives.

Real, honest, encouraging & contented

Real, honest, encouraging & contented.
Thank you for this and your other works as well.
Thank you

Great book for those who have or will go through divorce

Every detail of emotions and complexities of what divorce feels like to a family and how one repairs their heart.

The plot line is a vehicle for so much more

Dear Maggie, I love the Mountain Goats.
This book isn’t really about divorce, so don’t fear your own darkness and turn away too soon. It’s about unearthing a version of yourself that has been quietly mysteriously defiantly becoming without your knowing. And not in the lovely flower to behold kind of way, but instead in a complex honest unimaginable universal expanding sort of way.