You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir by Maggie Smith

This book is too damned hard to read in one sitting. Maybe it’s because Maggie Smith’s experience is so similar to mine, only I was married for 10 years longer. Maybe it’s because she has the same unanswerable questions I have, the same habit of rumination, the same sense of bewilderment.

Smith captures the whole unknowingness of the divorce arc so well using such honest and beautiful language that I found myself super anxious and feeling it all over again. However, once I got half way through, I was able to move from my heart to my head, and I started saying, “yes, me too, yes, yes, yes.” She writes through the whole experience – from discovering betrayal, to negotiating a divorce, to life afterward – while she’s still living it. Specifically, Smith describes how she treated her husband’s job as more important than hers, the imbalance of power that develops in marriages when one spouse far out-earns the other, keeping silent to keep the peace, holding a piece of rose quartz under the table in the attorney’s office, “listening to sad-ass songs on repeat,” and learning to accept what is.

“How I picture it: That life—the past, the beforelife, the beforemath—was a boat. The life I lived after, the afterlife, was on an island. I was marooned. I watched the horizon for sails. I wasted so much time, sunrise to sunset, thinking about the boat and what had been moving, slowly, darkly, in the water beneath it—time I could have been collecting rainwater or weaving leaves into shelter. Some nights were so overcast, I wondered if there had ever been stars. Other nights, lying on my back, I could see so many stars, anything felt possible.”

If you liked this book, you may want to check out the episode of Kate Bowler’s podcast Everything Happens in which she talks to Maggie Smith about this book.