You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

This reading group guide includes an introduction and discussion questions for your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

INTRODUCTION

In her long-awaited debut memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, award-winning poet Maggie Smith explores in lyrical vignettes the end of her marriage and the beginning of a surprising new life. A story that starts with Smith’s personal, particular heartbreak quickly grows into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, family, work, and patriarchy. With the spirit of reflection and empathy she’s known for, and a razor-sharp wit, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is an argument for possibility. With a poet’s attention to language and a transformation of the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.

TOPICS AND QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1) You Could Make This Place Beautiful plays with the genre of memoir both in terms of style and structure. How was the book different from other memoirs you have read?

2) Smith writes that this book isn’t a “tell-all,” it’s a “tell-mine.” Through the course of the book, one has the sense that Smith will never fully understand what happened to her marriage. How do we move forward in life when we experience inexplicable ruptures (a friendship that ends suddenly, the unexpected loss of a job)? How can we make peace with the not knowing?

3) The epigraph of the book is a quote from Emily Dickenson: “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” In what ways is this memoir a search for self, or even an excavation of self?

4) In “A Note on Setting” on page 13, Smith writes “If you opened me up, you’d find Ohio. . . . Setting is not just where I am, it’s who I am and what I am and why. It’s not just where I live, it’s how I live.” Do you feel this connection to your current home or a past one? What role does it play in your identity and how you live your life?

5) Throughout much of the book, Smith discusses her past and current selves, noting, “We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. . . . Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.” If you had to think of your own life in this way, what moments stand out? What are the past versions you envision of yourself?

6) How do issues of domestic labor and traditional gender roles play out in the book? Were there aspects of Smith’s story that you related to?

7) In reflecting on her marriage and her own mother’s life in the family home, Smith notes, “I saw myself and my husband as different—more progressive, more equal in our household, both with graduate degrees, both respected in our fields—but were we? The division of labor in our home told a different story.” How do you divide and think about labor in your own home? Do you wish it were different or want to change it? Did Smith’s discussion of these themes throughout the book impact your thinking at all?

8) Smith writes, “what would happen if I weren’t needed as a caregiver? What would the story be?” What would your life look like if you weren’t needed as a caregiver? What would be different, both in how you live your daily life and how you perceive yourself?

9) Throughout the book, Smith sets boundaries with the reader, choosing to reveal certain details and omit others, even naming a chapter, “This Moment Isn’t for You.” What did you think of these narrative choices? Were there times you wanted to know more? Why do you think that is? Are there details you omit when thinking about the story of your own life or when describing it to others?

10) Smith frequently discusses the music that forms the soundtrack of her life. Do you have artists in your life that you feel especially connected to? What role does music play in your daily life and in your memory making?

11) After Smith’s poem “Good Bones” goes viral, she tells a reporter, “I feel like I go into a phone booth and I turn into a poet sometimes. Most of the other time, I’m just Maggie who pushes the stroller.” If you’re a parent, do you feel this separation in identity between your work and your role as a parent? How does that separation make you feel?

12) The title of the book is taken from the last sentence of Smith’s viral poem in which she states, “I am trying / to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, / walking you through a real shithole, chirps on / about good bones: This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.” How do you “make this place beautiful” in difficult times?

13) In “A Note on the Title,” Smith writes, “Sometimes I feel like I titled this book Kittens and Rainbows, and then I wrote hell.” What were your expectations of the book before reading it, based on the title and cover? How did they change or stay the same after reading?

14) On page 110, Smith describes her social-media post that would eventually lead to her book Keep Moving. Have you read any of Smith’s other poems or essays? How does her previous work connect to and/or differ from You Could Make This Place Beautiful?

15) Consider the first sentence of the book (the epigraph, “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself ”) and the last sentence of the book (“I have waited for you all my life”). Do you think Smith finds herself in the end?