Summary

At the outset of her memoir, You Could Make this Place Beautiful, in the Prologue, Smith introduces her objective in writing her experience of divorce, love, and loss. She tells the reader that she is not attempting to write a tell-all but to explore her experience and discover the truths of her past. In “Pinecone”, Smith recalls the night she found a postcard addressed to another woman, in her now ex-husband’s briefcase. She read the last pages of his notebook before repacking the briefcase. In “Postcard”, Smith went upstairs and shook her husband awake. She remembers him “being disoriented. Of course he was disoriented—his wife woke him up, using another woman’s name in the dark, a name she wasn’t supposed to know” (6). In “Grenade”, the author threw out the pinecone the night she found the postcards. In...