67 pages • 2 hours read
Maggie SmithYou Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 31-78Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 31-56 Summary
Bittersweet
At their wedding, a college professor reads John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage,” which describes how two people lean against one another to make something stronger.
Violet
In December 2008, Smith gives birth to her daughter Violet. The pregnancy is difficult, and Smith is coerced into having a Caesarean section. When she sees her daughter, Smith feels that she is recognizing someone she already knew.
Grounds
Smith experiences postpartum depression after the birth of Violet. Her husband is finishing law school, and each day Smith eagerly waits for him to return home. During the first year of Violet’s life, Smith is unable to write. Then, at the end of the year, a poem emerges.
First Fall
This poem is written in first-person narrative voice. The narrator speaks to a child, explaining that fall is leaving and, with it, everything the narrator has taught her child about the season.
The Play
In the play version of Smith’s divorce, many key moments are unseen to the audience. The audience does not witness the many arguments and moments of tension that Smith and her husband experience as they make decisions about where they should live and what type of lives they should have. The character of “The Wife” shifts to the character of “The Mother.”
A Note on Character
The main character of the play—alternately called “The Wife,” “The Mother,” and “The Finder—” is a person who is unable to detach from experience. She is a person wired to care about everything.
A Note on Betrayal
Because her husband has betrayed her by cheating, Smith feels that she is absolved from trying to understand how she may have contributed to the end of her marriage. She wonders whether her marriage would have survived if her husband had not cheated.
The Leap
When Violet is two, Smith is awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, but the publisher she worked for is unwilling to give her leave. Unwilling to give up the fellowship, she quits her job as an editor and shifts to full-time freelance work. Nine days into the fellowship, Smith wakes at two o’clock in the morning with an uncontrollable sense that she should return to Ohio. When she arrives home, her husband tells her that Violet woke that morning at 2:00 am, violently crying and inconsolable.
As Violet grows older, Smith attempts to become pregnant again. She has two miscarriages before becoming pregnant with her son. People try to comfort her by saying that it is good she had not known the babies or held them, but Smith feels a profound sense of loss.
Here We Go Again
This chapter’s title refers to the words Smith’s husband says when he learns that she is pregnant again. They both worry about the outcome. Smith spends her pregnancy waiting for another miscarriage.
Rhett
Their son Rhett is born by Caesarian. During the operation, Smith hears her own irregular heartbeat.
Here Comes the Sun
Rhett is an unhappy baby. He cries constantly, and Smith feels she is losing herself and her grasp on sanity. She is desperate to discover what she calls The Pattern—the secret to making Rhett happy and causing him to sleep regularly. Her husband and daughter do not want to be around her. Violet remarks that Smith is always angry. When Smith visits the doctor, she learns that she has postpartum anxiety and depression.
A Note on Inciting Incidents
Smith worries that her son will become depressed because she sings James Taylor songs to him. She fears he will be just like her: “too raw for the world, nerves too close to the skin” (54).
A Note on the Author’s Intention
When Violet is in preschool, she makes crafts that she called “revengines.” Smith admires the word and wonders whether it might also apply to her own work, but she decides her writing is not powered by revenge or anger. She seeks only to understand and to find herself.
Pages 57-78 Summary
A Friend Says Every Book Begins with an Unanswerable Question
In this chapter, Smith asks herself how she might begin to forgive.
An Offering
Smith notes that her story is not one of hero and villain. She recognizes that she was not her best self when married to her husband. She describes the memoir as an offering to her pain and an attempt to forgive.
A Note on Foreshadowing
While listening to her husband give a speech at her book launch party, Smith is struck by the fact that the way her husband speaks about her in public differs from the way he treats her at home.
Hidden Pictures
In the fall of 2015, Smith writes a poem called “Good Bones” that is later published in the journal Waxwing. The poem goes viral, splitting Smith into two people—who she was at home with her children and the famous poet.
Good Bones
This poem, which launched Smith’s fame, discusses the shortness and brutality of life and her desperate desire to hide these facts from her children. She wants her children to see the beauty in the structure of the world and to add to its beauty.
This Wasn’t the Deal
Smith’s husband tells her that she is famous, and it feels like an accusation.
On Second Thought
The author wonders what her children will think about her career as a writer and whether they will resent that it was not enough for her to simply be their mother. She realizes that this is not a thought that a father would have.
Some People Will Ask
Smith addresses those who may question why she feels it necessary to write about something so personal. She contemplates the way women are silenced and how writing the memoir helps her to make sense of her loss.
The Bully Won?
Each year, Smith takes her children with her to vote. In 2016, her daughter accompanies her while she casts her vote for Hillary Clinton. She promises Violet that she will wake her when the announcement is made so they can celebrate together. When Violet wakes the next morning, she realizes that Trump has won the election. Violet feels the shock of realization that good does not always triumph.
Not That One
Smith learns that her poem “Good Bones” will appear in an episode of Madam Secretary. At the end of the episode, a character pulls her poem from his wallet as though he carries it with him always, and Smith cries. She learns that Meryl Streep read one of her poems at a gala. Meanwhile, Smith’s life remains unchanged in many ways. She is still a mother. She still walks the dog.
A Note on Foreshadowing
During a question-and-answer session after a reading, an audience member asks Smith about her experience as a single mother. After hearing this question, Smith realizes that she did not mention her husband at all in her last book.
But Here’s the Thing
Smith struggles to make sense of her experience when parts of it are still hidden from her.
A Note on Betrayal
Because her husband cheated, Smith feels that she does not need to dissect what happened. She realizes that they have been growing distant for many years.
Clues to the Mystery
Like seeking The Pattern that would make Rhett sleep, Smith tries to understand the pattern of what happened in her marriage, but she remains unable to do so.
A Friend Says Every Book Begins with an Unanswerable Question
In this chapter, Smith asks, “where did it go” (78).
Pages 31-78 Analysis
Smith’s memoir has several parallels to Joan Didion’s National Book Award winning memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (HarperCollins, 2005). Didion writes about losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne, to a heart attack at the same time that her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was battling a series of chronic and severe illnesses. In the year after her husband’s death, Didion lived in a dreamlike state. Didion interweaves elements from her marriage and from when her daughter was young, adding context to her grief. Smith’s book explores Divorce as Loss. Like Didion, Smith avoids a chronological retelling; this section is splashed with hints of foreshadowing in her early life and the impact of raising two children and enduring two miscarriages on her and her marriage. Later in Smith’s work, she refers directly to magical thinking, paying homage to Didion’s innovative memoir.
Her experiences trap her in a cycle of mourning and stress. Her career, too, adds to her heartache. When she was young, she envisioned herself as a writer, but working as an editor leaves her with little time to pursue her own creative projects. When she finally devotes herself to writing full-time, she feels that she has lost her identity as a mother. Her children see her working at home, and her husband resents her success. While staying with other artists during a residency, she feels compelled in the middle of the night to return home. When she arrives, she learns that at the exact moment she felt the pull to return, her daughter had awoken, crying. Smith describes this story as a type of “magical thinking.” She feels compelled to return home because of her role as mother, even as she experiences guilt for not completing her residency. This is one of many instances in which her two core identities—mother and writer—are at odds with one another.
Patriarchal Expectations in Contemporary Marriage place Smith and many other women in the position of continual loss. One part of her life always suffers as she devotes attention to another part. Just as it did for Didion, magical thinking occurs when Smith tries to cope, justify, and make sense of her experience.
Smith’s revisitation of The Play allows the reader to contemplate the theme of Patriarchal Expectations in Contemporary Marriage further. Her character in the play toggles among three character names: “The Wife,” “The Mother,” and “The Finder.” In the first two, her identity is defined by her relationship to others. The final name defines her on her own terms, as a seeker. This new identity is brought on by her husband’s betrayal. The realization of this causes Smith to wonder if she would have been able to carve out her own identity without her husband’s affair. Smith returns to her role as “The Mother” as she contemplates whether her children resent her need to develop an identity outside of her relationship with them. She realizes that fathers do not have this same concern. Patriarchal expectations pull Smith in multiple directions, causing her to feel as though she is never devoting herself fully to anyone, least of all herself.
Yet, the same part of her character that leaves her feeling guilty is the one that leads to her self-discovery. When Rhett is a baby, Smith struggles to get him to sleep and to stop crying. She feels certain that she will uncover a pattern that will restore peace to her life. Smith’s memoir is a larger attempt to find patterns—in her marriage and in her identity. She seeks to understand the narrative of her divorce. The repetition of “A Note on Betrayal” reveals how her husband’s cheating gave her an excuse to ignore ongoing problems in their marriage. Rather than analyze what happened, she could merely point to his adultery as the reason for her marriage’s end. However, Smith is The Finder. Her experience with Divorce and Self-Discovery is not immune from her need to make and find meaning. When an audience member asks her about being a single parent, she realizes she did not mention her husband in her latest book. Smith recognizes that her marriage was ending long before her husband’s affair.
In the poem “First Fall,” the narrator speaks to her child about the seasons. Because children often believe that something that is taken away from them may never return, the narrator assures her child that fall will return: “The first time you see / something die, you won’t know it might / come back” (36). This mirrors Smith’s own feeling about her life after divorce. She describes the sense of loss she feels when her marriage ends. She mourns not only the destruction of her partnership, but also the loss of certainty in her future. She no longer knows what her future will look like. Although she cannot fully picture who she is outside of her marriage and motherhood, she recognizes that her identity and future are still waiting for her. The poem “First Fall” is a reminder that beauty and light will return, and that death is not final.
