The following version of the book was used to create the guide: Smith, Maggie. You Could Make The Place Beautiful. One Signal Publishers, 2023.

Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, explores the author’s heartbreak, divorce, and journey to rebuild her life, through a series of lyrical vignettes. At the outset of the text, Smith tells her reader that she is not attempting to write a tell-all but to speak to her personal experiences and discover her truth. When she was still married to her ex-husband, Smith found a postcard addressed to another woman, in his bag. She wanted his betrayal to account for the demise of their relationship but knew that they had not been emotionally connected in years. When the couple started marriage counselling, the conversations focused on Smith’s work, her travel for work, and her husband’s frustrations with her. Retrospectively, Smith sees the imbalance in their relationship but at the time was desperate to save her marriage. She feared being alone and having to redefine herself as an individual. After a contentious family vacation, Smith’s husband moved out of the house, and they told their children about the divorce. In the immediate aftermath, Smith imagined rewinding time and redoing her marriage. She found solace in imagining that she could have fixed their relationship.

As the text continues, Smith struggles to contextualize her life without the marriage. However, with time, she challenged her own regressive thought patterns. When she no longer needed sad songs to soothe her, she began listening to early 90s hip hop. She tells the reader that, much later, she realized that these songs were the soundtrack to her life before she met her ex-husband. By reconnecting with a version of herself that was not a wife, not his wife, she is able to explore her individuality. Her therapists encourage her to set boundaries, create space for herself, and interrogate her relationship with caregiving. When the pandemic began in 2020, Smith felt that the pain of her divorce was small and petty in light of the global lockdown and persistent death. During the mandated quarantine, she started a roller-skating club with her friend, Wendy, and promised herself to find joy wherever she could.

Toward the close of, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Smith contends with how she wants to move forward in her life. She threw out the furniture that she shared with her husband to clear physical and mental space for a new life inside of the house. Instead of continuing to live in memory, she actively looked toward a future with experiences she had yet to live. She practiced saying yes and swam in the ocean for the first time in years. Her relationships with her children, Rhett and Violet, encouraged her to persevere and find love in every facet of her life. At the close of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Smith acknowledges that her life in the present does not look the same as it did during her marriage. For the first time, she values and loves herself. She concludes the text with her poem, “Bride” which explores self-partnership, love, and grace.