You Could Make This Place Beautiful - Maggie Smith
Genre - Memoir

When I completed You Could Make This Place Beautiful, written and read by Maggie Smith, I said out loud in my empty car. Oh, I loved this - it was indeed beautiful. I don’t always respond out loud to books, but when particularly moved, I sure do. (Don’t all English teaching librarians?) This lyrical memoir focuses on Smith’s divorce and its aftermath, but the insights she gained and shares here are valuable to us all. Smith reading her own words was particularly powerful for me, but also I will be getting a hold of a copy of the print book because I have a need to see her words on the page.

Part of the appeal for me was how transparent she was about writing as a writer. The vignettes are punctuated with discussion of the sorts of terms English teachers and writing love. If I were still teaching, I might be tempted to use those pieces just to prove that they exist outside of the English classroom. She stretches me to think differently about structure and writing (why I need to see it in print). I love the repetition that a book is rooted in a question that can’t be answered to title her sections. I have often thought recently about what question a book is meant to answer and whether or not it does so. She does so here even if the current answer for her is uncertain. Ultimately a hopeful throughline provides a general answer even when specifics are still resolving. Her work also includes her poetry - illustrating so beautifully how poems come often from experience and how they can also help the poet and her reader work through experiences. I love her frankness and honesty and that she is careful with what she shares - just using the 2nd person voice to tell us so. I cried with her, was angry with her, laughed with her as she reflected on her journey. As a parent who worries endlessly about her kids, her words about them resonated with me quite powerfully. The prose here reflects her life as a poet. Her words are lyrical. She creates imagery, figurative language, and symbols while I’m sure not effortlessly, it reads that way.

Change - particularly that which is unsought - is difficult. Even when I choose to change, I often struggle with the reality of it. I know I have missed some lovely opportunities in my life because of my struggles with change. Smith very much speaks to me here. She teaches through this work that adapting ,while painful, can yield beautiful results. She also illustrates the powerful connections through metaphor that can easily be overlooked in the tasks of living each day. She is honest and reflective, and I admire how she uses writing - poetic and prose - to note her struggles and to work through many of them.I wish I had the capacity, talent, devotion - fill in the blank - to create art this beautiful and thought provoking. I wish I took more time to reflect on how my mindset impacts the way I live from day to day. Perhaps this You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith will inspire me to do so BEFORE I fill my days with activities and tasks to keep busy, busy, busy. Wouldn’t that be something?