“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself” reads the epigraph to poet Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Fans of Keep Moving, Smith’s bestselling self-help guide primarily based on tweets she wrote throughout the interval following her separation and eventual divorce from her associate of 19 years, might be keen to listen to about her seek for and supreme reclamation of herself.
Written as a sequence of prose vignettes, You Could Make This Place Beautiful recounts the narrative of Smith’s divorce, starting on the night that Smith discovered a postcard in her husband’s work satchel that exposed romantic intimacy with a stranger. This prompted a whirlwind of {couples} remedy, arguments and reflection on how the connection had soured previous to the betrayal. She compares their marriage to a fruit whose pit of love is pure however surrounded by rotting flesh. As the pictures and metaphors for loss collect momentum, the guide concurrently doubles again on itself, asking unanswerable questions: How to heal? How to hold this trauma ahead? How to set it down? How to forgive? How to grieve?
As these queries present, this memoir is each the story of the dissolution of Smith’s marriage and in addition an inquiry into the act of telling that story—how one can decide the start and the top, how one can find the middle, how one can characterize the brokenness and sweetness, and even how one can discover moments of solace. Music performs an vital function all through this guide, and I cherished listening to the songs Smith referenced as I used to be studying. (As it seems, Smith’s story impressed the track “Picture of My Dress” by the Mountain Goats, which started as a Twitter trade between Smith and songwriter John Darnielle.) In Keep Moving, Smith addressed the function that artwork and artists have performed in her seek for herself, and in You Could Make This Place Beautiful, she gives readers a private playlist.
Smith’s memoir is a wonderful instance of how metaphor and imagery can seize the essence of experiences which are troublesome to elucidate, and it’ll lead readers to suppose extra deeply concerning the relationships in their very own lives.
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