Prose Like a Poet and Permission Slips: A Conversation with Maggie Smith

You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

by Maggie Smith

Atria/One Signal Publishers (2023); 320 pp.; $26.04 (Hardcover)

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Maggie Smith is an award-winning poet, writer, and teacher. Her previous best-selling books include Goldenrod and Keep Moving, and her poem “Good Bones” was read on an episode of Madam Secretary. Her first memoir came out in April and was an instant New York Times Best Seller. You Could Make This Place Beautiful is Smith’s searing search for meaning in the aftermath of a divorce. She caught up with Literary Mama publisher Cindy DiTiberio via Zoom in late February. This conversation has been edited for content and clarity.

Cindy DiTiberio: Keep Moving was in some ways a precursor to this book. Can you talk about how you decided to write more fully about your divorce, and why you felt called to give your grief more air?

Maggie Smith: When I was working on Keep Moving, it hadn’t occurred to me that I would ever write this book. I think if I could have avoided writing this book, I would have. But it became the book elephant in my writing room, and I didn’t know how to live that experience [of getting divorced], which is completely immersive, and then try to busy myself by writing something completely outside of my lived experience.

Even when I am writing poems, I am writing primarily from my lived experience. As I sat down and thought, “Okay, what kind of writing do I feel like doing?,” the kind of writing I needed to do was around this situation: What now? What happened? Was it always like this? Was this inevitable? Could I have done something differently? How far back would I have to rewind to change how this story moved and flowed? I had all these questions. I didn’t know how to get past them without really diving in and writing my way through it. I learned quickly that I couldn’t do the kind of work that I did in this book in a collection of poems.

CDT: What I thought was so beautiful, in terms of form and function, was that the writing reflected the experience you were going through, which included brief moments of clarity and then a lot of questions. And then another moment of clarity and then another question. The reader felt that experience with you on the page. Did you receive any pushback on your structure of short vignettes and one-sentence chapters? Or did your publishing team understand what you were trying to do?

MS: What I turned in was surprising in lots of ways and I think everyone acclimated to the vision. It’s been lovely to take risks and do something innovative and feel like people get it. Hearing how you described your reading experience is so moving because that was exactly what I was hoping for.

I prose like a poet. I couldn’t write this book as someone else. So I knew it would probably be written in vignettes. I love small, concise bits, and I love imagistic writing, and I love patterning with motif. These are all poetry tools.

Whenever I sit down to work on a piece of writing, I ask, what is the best form for this content? What is the container and why? If it is a poem, it shouldn’t just be couplets because I like the way it looks. There needs to be some reason why no other form is the right form. And for this story, memory doesn’t happen in a linear way. Memory is associative. It’s like a web. I knew that I needed some linear narrative to carry the reader through, but that there would be a lot of bouncing around in time. I wanted the reader to feel how disorienting this was, not just be told.

CDT: For someone who has just gone through a similar situation, your description of divorce felt so true to the experience. Revisiting the past in the attempt to understand, ruminating on betrayal, returning to things that you can’t let go of. Your form mirrored the mental experience you described.

MS: I’m so happy to hear you say that. This experience was very much like a spiral or a series of waves. It was not a straight line or an arc, so there was not a way for me to write it in a more conventional way. Whenever you are writing about grief or loss, you are writing about rumination, and you’re writing about nostalgia. And those things do not happen in a straight line.

CDT: There are so few books about the experience of divorce, and I think one of the reasons why so many people were clamoring for galleys of your book was not just because they can’t wait to read your writing, but they were going through something similar and had nowhere to turn to feel less alone. Your being open and willing to write this book is a gift and an offering. How do you feel as you are on the cusp of letting it into the world?

MS: I’m feeling okay. Yes, it is scary. This is the first time I’m offering this much of my interior life. It is a different beast. What I have heard from many people is, “Oh my gosh, I could never do that,” or “I would have been too scared to do that.”

But it was not brave to write this book. It was necessary to write this book. Maybe it is brave to publish the book. Could I have written it and put it in a drawer? I suppose. But I am a writer. This is how my lights stay on. I don’t do any writing just for myself—other than to-do lists. I am not a diary keeper. If I write something down, I am always hoping that it will find its way into a piece that I will share. I finished the book and thought, well, this is kind of a strange creature. I haven’t really read a book like this. I could either take that as a sign that it shouldn’t live in the world because it doesn’t look like another book that I’ve read, or I could take it as a sign that it should live in the world because then there would be a book that looks like this.

CDT: You wrote a Substack recently about permission slips. I think this book grants permission to others to play with form and be more exploratory about how their writing wants to express itself. It doesn’t have to be either/or, or neatly contained within a particular genre. 

MS: That is my greatest goal. If someone picks up this book and the only thing they get from it is, oh, you can do that? You can tell a story like that? That kind of permission? That would make me so happy.

CDT: The book unpacks some of the tension you felt between your job as the primary caretaker and your writing career once it began to take off in a significant way. Tension within yourself and within your marriage. The tension of needing to ask permission and feeling trapped by responsibilities. How much of the demise of your marriage was due to the particularities of your dynamic, versus how much was due to the limiting structure of heterosexual marriage, where gendered expectations come into play?

MS: I have no idea. I think part of writing this book was a somewhat naïve but well-intentioned idea that if I thought deeply enough into this time in my life, if I really unpacked all of these questions, then I would be able to answer them in a way that would allow me to put them down. That I would be at peace with the situation and therefore not need to think about it anymore. I think my goal in writing this book was to feel better. And I did end up feeling better, but not because I solved everything.

I know a lot of people who are happily married. Or they say they are, or they seem to be. I guess I’m not so jaded that I think it can’t work for anyone. I came out of my divorce feeling like it was a real rare thing when a marriage doesn’t work. Now I feel like it is a miracle that people last for a very long time. It seems magical because it feels like at any moment things can go so sideways.

CDT: Reclamation of the self was also a theme in the book. I loved the scene where you are listening to music from your high school years, and you write: “I predated this shit, the music reminded me, and I would outlast it.” That line totally hit me. Like, yes, I was a person before, I am a person after—how do I hold on to that? The way society sets up marriage and motherhood, women are taught to abandon themselves; we’re taught to sacrifice ourselves. I mean, I love being a mother, but I don’t love what it did to me in those early years. I mean, jeez.

MS: Please. If just a look could be a Q and A, I know what you mean!

CDT: When you lose yourself in motherhood, you lose yourself in marriage. How do we help people resist the message that we must sacrifice ourselves in order to be good wives and mothers? 

MS: Even the verb “lose.” I think part of the other side of that is the giving that we do. And frankly, the patriarchal expectation of asymmetrical giving. It’s a problem. It’s funny, I thought the other day, if I could go back and do it differently, what would I change? And the weirdly, somewhat comforting—but also infuriating—answer to that question is, I wouldn’t do much differently. Therefore, the outcome would be the same.

I worked really hard throughout the book to take responsibility for my own choices. To forgive myself. Because family systems are not handed to us. Some of it is inherited. We often parent against or alongside how we were raised. If given the choice, I still would have taken on 90 percent of the childcare. Not because that is what I saw my mother do, although that is true, but because I really wanted to do it. And I was never, if I’m honest, very comfortable delegating or allowing anyone else to do a whole lot.

It’s difficult if you have a system set up at home to try and renegotiate the terms later, particularly if those original terms seem pretty good to at least one of the people in the system. It is easy to make changes when everyone agrees things aren’t working. But if it is working for someone and not working for someone else, that’s a different story. I think that is what we bump into particularly around work and caregiving and the balance of those things in a marriage. It’s like, But you’ve always done those things until now. I like you doing those things. This is inconvenient. But if I had to do it again, I would still be doing all the doctors’ appointments, the soccer games. It is who I am and how I show love. It is so tricky.

CDT: Hearing you say that made me think about the desire to clone ourselves so that we could be the one doing all the caregiving, but there could also be a part of us that is in a room writing. But you must choose, and it is in that choosing that the tension really feels uncomfortable. I also think that men are not conditioned to think that they should take all that on. That is not part of being a good dad, that is not part of being a good man. They have the luxury of not feeling responsible for the caregiving.

MS: One hundred percent. There is a reason why mom guilt is a known phrase and there is no such thing as dad guilt. What would dad guilt even be? I don’t even know what that would look like. No one is asking male writers at AWP who is taking care of their children. Even if they are single dads. I can’t tell you how many times I am asked, “Who has the kids?” The idea that it is “my job”—I don’t think that is something that we put onto men.

CDT: Every woman who is trying to be a mother and be something else is carrying that burden. And it is a heavy, heavy burden.

In your poem “Good Bones,” you talk about presenting the world to your children and wanting to protect them from hard things. You repeat this phrase: “I keep this from my children.” The divorce was a hard thing that you couldn’t keep from your children. This was a hard thing that you brought upon your children. How did you carry that?

MS: It’s hard to see your children go through anything difficult. My allegiance in my writing, and my life, is to my kids. I am always measuring what I say against those little Jiminy Crickets on my shoulders. And what they could live with. Because [my children] may read this someday. Not until they’re grown-ups—and maybe not ever because I’m not sure anyone wants to read their mother’s book—but on the off chance, I wanted to make sure that they were comfortable and felt really loved.

When I finished the book, I showed it to someone early on, and she said, “You know, I didn’t know what this book would be, but I think it’s really a love letter to your children.” And I was like, yes. It’s the end of one love story that I thought was a forever story and wasn’t, but there is another very forever love story in this book. Actually, there are lots of them—my parents and my sisters and my friends and my hometown—in addition to the one with my kids.

CDT: You wonder, early in the book, whether you want to undo it all—the relationship, the marriage, the heartbreak, the divorce, but that would mean sacrificing your kids. Later you write of wanting the ability to “save the children and jettison the marriage.” You write, “I don’t know how to do it, but I believe it can be done. As in some Greek myth we’re yet to discover, a son and daughter spring from me, whole.”

MS: I said to someone the other day, if I were reincarnated as a cat, I would want them to be my kittens. They are my people, and God help them, they are stuck with me. Wanting to undo everything is something that we commonly feel when we are suffering. Feeling pain, but not being in a place of deep suffering, allows me to not want to undo everything—especially the existence of my children.