You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

It's rare that I read a book twice and if I do it is years between readings. I loved YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL by award-winning poet Maggie Smith so much that as soon as I finished the last page, I went back to the beginning and read it again.

In her debut memoir, Smith tenderly examines the end of her marriage and learns to embrace the new life she creates. As she grieves her old life, she tenderly pilots her children and herself toward a new kind of life. Smith reminds her readers that her memoir is not a "tell-all," but rather a "tell-mine, or maybe a find-mine." She asks herself how her story can be useful to anyone other than herself? When she writes poetry or prose, she must trust that the reader will make meaning out of the words she writes. Will the metaphor of say, a nesting doll, make sense to the reader?

"I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you. I need to trust that you'll know what to do with it. Here, take it," she writes, "Is this enough? This is my material."

Throughout the book, Smith returns to her friend's writing advice -- every book begins with an unanswerable question. Then what is mine? she asks, midway through the book -- and answers, how to remain myself.

With a mother's fierce love, she comforts her children. When her young son Rhett has trouble falling asleep, he tells her that he knows he has a mom who loves him and a dad who loves him, but he says, heartbreakingly, I don't have a family. As her adolescent daughter Violet bemoans the loss of a friendship, Smith feels her pain intimately -- ah yes, she says, the stages of divorce.

When her husband chooses to move out of state with a new partner, she is the one left to cope with juggling work and home life, angst and tears. She remains in the house she and her husband bought together, to create a safe haven and a secure and enduring space for her children.

YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL is not a tell-all as Smith assures us -- it is a contemplation on modern love, a reckoning with expectations, and an excavation of self. It is a lyrical meditation on hope and what is left when all seems lost. Maggie Smith does indeed make something beautiful -- a life lived with integrity and love and possibility.

I'm going to go read it again. I hope you will too.