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.
Themes
Divorce and Self-Discovery
Interspersed throughout the memoir are chapters titled “The Play.” Examining her life through the medium of an imagined play allows her to observe rather than experience, viewing the timeline of her marriage through a third-person lens. The character that represents Maggie Smith is named at different points in the narrative as The Not-Yet-Wife, The Wife, The Mother, and The Finder. In the first identity, she is still only defined by her relationship to someone else. She attends a play her husband wrote. One of the characters learns that his wife is having an affair. Smith explains to the reader that the character of the woman is unable to see the foreshadowing in her own life, because people never notice foreshadowing in the plot of their own experience. Her new roles as a wife and mother strip her of her previous self, defining her identity by her relationships to others. She becomes The Finder when she discovers the postcard in her husband’s bag.
Smith’s divorce forces her to examine her life and to meet herself once more. Her connection to music is particularly revealing. Music is important to Smith and her children. Immediately after her divorce, she listens to sad songs and artists she enjoyed with her husband. Slowly, she begins to listen to more musical artists from when she was younger. She realizes that these were all musicians she enjoyed before she met her husband. Smith begins to see the many ways she lost herself in her marriage. She stopped prioritizing her career as a poet to appease her husband, and she lost her sense of joy. Divorce created a framework for Smith to enter a period of self-discovery, to learn who she once was, and to learn who she wants to be.
The culmination of her self-discovery is the poem “The Bride.” In this poem, Smith realizes that—even while she was married to her husband—she was married to herself. She recognizes that she is an excellent partner to herself, and she speaks to herself with the language of a lover: “How long have I been wed / to myself? Calling myself / darling” (301). At this point in her journey of self-discovery, Smith’s identity shifts. The name “The Finder” takes on a new meaning—no longer the woman who found evidence of her husband’s affair and felt like a ghost in her home, haunting the halls, barely visible, now The Finder is the woman who actively seeks herself. This corresponds with a quote from Emily Dickinson at the beginning of the memoir, in which Dickinson writes that she is seeking herself, searching with lanterns. Smith pauses often throughout the work to remind the reader that she does not have all the answers, that she is still looking for herself with lanterns.
Contemporary Patriarchal Marriage
Smith’s memoir highlights the insidious ways in which patriarchal expectations and behavior patterns can persist in modern heterosexual marriages, even when both partners profess feminist ideals. On paper, Smith’s marriage appears to embody the egalitarian dream of modern marriage. She and her husband have two children, a boy and a girl. Their marriage is filled with happy memories. They work side by side in coffee shops, visit cabins and beaches, and write love letters to one another. He is a lawyer, and she is a successful editor and writer. Smith finds fame when she publishes her poem “Good Bones,” elevating her career to her new level.
However, there are cracks in the veneer. Smith’s husband resents her for prioritizing her writing, and he fails to take on his fair share of the invisible labor of running a home. He undermines her career, even allowing his divorce attorney to use air quotes when referring to Smith’s work. Their marriage is not unlike many contemporary marriages; many women have their work diminished, because so much of what they do is rendered invisible by patriarchal structures. Smith wonders repeatedly if her children will grow up to believe that their father’s work was more important than hers, especially because she works from home. Even though they see her on the computer each day, she realizes they will not connect her to her work in the same way they will their father who leaves for an office each day. This idea is further expressed in the difference between the two parents’ approaches to travel. When her husband travels for work, Smith is not inconvenienced. Because she already does the bulk of the daily work of parenting and running a home, she carries forward without him. When she is gone, Smith’s husband is frequently frustrated and overwhelmed, unable to handle the wide range of tasks she completes while maintaining a full-time job.
It is important to note the way patriarchal structures impact men. The Will to Change, by bell hooks, explores the many harmful effects of patriarchy on men, including separation from their own emotions and from deep and meaningful love. Smith’s husband takes his wife’s work as an attack on his role as the head of the household and his position as a creative. Rather than celebrating her success and taking a more active role in the home, he doubles down on his need for her to become less so that he can be more. When he moves out, he does not take any pictures or their children’s art. He disconnects entirely from his emotional past. Later, he moves 500 miles away from his children, deepening the divide.
Smith highlights how contemporary womanhood is marked by both immense freedom and immense entrapment. When Smith’s marriage ends, she learns to live a different type of womanhood, one outside of patriarchal marriage and others-centered identity. She begins to set boundaries and to say yes to new experiences and opportunities.
Divorce as Loss
You Could Make This Place Beautiful approaches divorce as a type of loss. Smith references Magical Thinking multiple times throughout the memoir, drawing attention to Joan Didion’s seminal work The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion’s memoir describes the author’s experiences after the deaths of her husband and daughter. She describes her reliance on magical thinking, the belief that she could alter the past or bring her family back by living in a particular way. Although Smith does not utilize Didion’s definition of magical thinking directly, her reference to Didion’s work emphasizes that divorce can be a source of grief similar to the grief one experiences at the loss of a loved one.
Didion processes her grief in the same stages that are often applied to mourning. Denial, the first stage of grief, occurs when Smith and her husband attend marriage counseling. Smith does not talk about her discovery of the postcard and ignores her own feelings out of desire to maintain peace. She enters the stage of bargaining as she makes concessions for her career to appease her husband’s desire that she spend more time at home. Rather than confronting the end of her marriage, she tries to maintain the status quo. However, the pinecone is a grenade that cannot be ignored forever, and when Smith finally acknowledges her discovery—thereby, acknowledging her loss—she is ready to move into a new phase.
The loss that Smith experiences is far more than the loss of her marriage. She explains that the postcard changes everything, including the trajectory of her future. Prior to her discovery, she felt that she had her future mapped out, but afterward, she no longer knows what is coming. Smith also experiences the loss of her memories and the partner who shared them with her. Their happy memories together are now shadowed by the divorce, and she can no longer reach out to the person with whom she shared fifteen years of experience. Smith enters the stage of grief associated with depression. She feels like a ghost in her own home.
Slowly, Smith enters the stage of acceptance, which allows her to rediscover joy, both with her children and with herself. She skates with her children while listening to music and performs small plays with them at the kitchen table. She attends writing workshops and feels transformed by collaboration and creativity. The book emphasizes that divorce has the same psychological and physiological effects as grief. Smith’s story represents a person who has experienced a profound loss and crawled her way back.
