“What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time. I would have done it for longer if he’d let me.”
Maggie Smith writes a poem that blows up and becomes the beginning of the end of her marriage. In her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith details the disintegration of her marriage, the heartbreak that followed and her renewed commitment to herself and her children. This is a book about what happens to a marriage where your significant other becomes jealous of your success and expects you to shrink yourself and maintain the status quo of what your marriage was before your fame.
“I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.”
I remember reading an excerpt of this book as an essay in The Cut and loving it, which is why I picked it up. This book should have stayed an essay. I do not think Maggie Smith had enough material to make this an actual book. I was fascinated by the dynamic I saw expressed in that essay because it is a dynamic that I am very familiar with as a Nigerian woman. Smith’s lawyer husband constantly belittled her creative work, expecting her to perform a housewife role, even though she worked from home and when success finally found her, he resented her for it. I wanted to get an understanding of how despite being more educated than her mother, she had fallen into the exact same role as her mother even though she thought her, and her husband were a modern couple.
“Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done.”
I never got this understanding because even though Maggie Smith chose to write this memoir, she is very reluctant to share her side of the story. She insists on telling us that there is no one truth, which is true, and also the very reason she should have never written a memoir if her truth hadn’t been solidified yet. If your feelings are still ever constantly changing, don’t write a memoir and then accuse your readers of having a voyeuristic gaze for daring to be curious about information that you are writing about.
She constantly would bring up a piece of information and then proceed to tell the readers that she would not tell us that information, why bring it up then Maggie? We did not ask you to write this book. You did! Why write the things you do not want to write about? Why keep bringing up specific scenes that the reader would have no idea about if you didn’t bring it up only to tell us that you won’t tell us what was said in the scene?
“I’m trying to tell you the truth, so let me be clear: I didn’t want this lemonade. My kids didn’t want this lemonade. This lemonade was not worth the lemons. And yet, the lemons were mine. I had to make something from them, so I did. I wrote. I’ll drink to that.”
One thing that is very clear in this book is that Smith is still angry. You can read it from the lines she has written and those she insists she will not write. I do not fault her for this, and she has every right to be angry. Her husband cheats on her, she finds out and proceeds to never confront him about it. He lets them go to couple therapy for months where he demands things from her that would mean the death of her career while never admitting that he cheated.
Infact Maggie spends therapy sessions continually twisting herself into pretzels to get this man to stay and never brings up the fact that she found out he was cheating on her. In the end, he makes the decision to end their marriage, get on dating apps and then move out of state, away from his children, to begin a new life with his affair partner. Who wouldn’t be angry?
“As if you have to break someone’s heart to make them strong. I could say you don’t get to take credit for someone’s growth if they grow as a result of what you put them through.”
Maggie Smith is a better poet than she is a prose writer. This book is so repetitive that I just wanted it to end. I love poetry so I enjoyed this more than the general public is ever going to. Smith spends the entire book circling around the thing while refusing to tell us about the thing. And she is so heavy handed every time she thinks she’s written a great line or said something profound that you can smell her smugness coming off the page. All in all, I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads because I enjoyed the great lines in the book, but I actually wouldn’t recommend it.
Leggy
TwoNightStands 