You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

Maggie Smith (1977) is an American poet and writer from Columbus, Ohio. As a child, Smith was fearful and suspicious of surprises. Her family nicknamed her Check Listy for her devotion to planning and organizing. Smith describes her family as close, and she takes pride in living near her loved ones and spending time with them. Smith graduated with a BA from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA from Ohio State University. Smith’s experiences after university are detailed in the memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a New York Times bestseller, which explores the end of her marriage, her overnight fame, and the reconstruction of her personal identity. Smith met her husband while taking a creative writing workshop in college. After graduating, she worked as an editor for a children’s book publisher while her husband finished law school. The couple had two children, Violet and Rhett. The birth of her children and her two miscarriages impacted Smith’s mental health.

In 2011, Smith received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The writer left her work as an editor and devoted herself fully to freelance writing. After the 2016 election and Trump’s inauguration, Smith grappled with what it meant to raise her children in a new world. One night, after her husband returned home from work, Smith went to Starbucks and wrote down her feelings in the poem “Good Bones.” In 2016, Waxwing published the piece. “Good Bones” went viral, catapulting her to national acclaim. The poem has been translated into a dozen languages and has appeared in numerous radio and television outlets. Smith was invited to read at festivals and workshops around the world.

Shortly after “Good Bones” went viral, Smith’s marriage ended. The author hid the discovery of her husband’s affair and their subsequent time in counseling from friends, family, and public view. You Could Make This Place Beautiful begins at this point in Smith’s life and digs into the years leading up to it. Smith was apprehensive at first to write a memoir, especially as she considered herself primarily a poet rather than a prose writer, but the popularity of her Twitter account caused many to request a book on surviving divorce. The author views form and structure as an inherent part of the content of a work. The loose form and vignette structure of You Could Make This Place Beautiful allows the reader to gain a sense of Smith’s fractured feelings and identities throughout her marriage.

Smith’s works Goldenrod; Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change; and Good Bones are national bestsellers. Good Bones is the winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry. The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison is the winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize and 2016 Independent Publish Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry. Her first book of poetry, Lamp of the Body, is the winner of the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award. Smith’s My Thoughts Have Wings is scheduled for publication with HarperCollins in 2024.