You Could Make This Place Beautiful cover art

You Could Make This Place Beautiful

A Memoir

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You Could Make This Place Beautiful

By: Maggie Smith
Narrated by: Maggie Smith
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About this listen

 INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NPR Best Book of the Year • TimeBest Book of the Year • Oprah DailyBest 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. Motherhood Parenting & Families Relationships Memoir

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."
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What an extraordinary way with words Maggie Smith has. This is one of the best memoirs I've read this year. I felt every emotion as her journey unfolded, which resonated with my own story in surprising ways. Divorce is gut-wrenching, traumatic and devastating, made more so when you didn't see it coming. Secrets, betrayal, and loss seem to be a universal story for so many women, and yet we endure, we learn, and then we thrive. After listening to this story I had to buy the hard copy. It's one of those books that you can keep referring back to, one that needs to be seen and heard. An inspiring and magical memoir, as only Maggie Smith can write.

A Gift of Words

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