Maggie Smith’s 'You Could Make This Place Beautiful'

A reading guide and exclusive excerpt

Hello,

Our next True Stories Book Club is on:

Thursday 29th February (leap day!)

6pm UK/1pm ET/10am PT. 

This month, I’m delighted to tell you that my guest will be the poet and memoirist Maggie Smith, speaking about her book You Could Make This Place Beautiful. This month, we have an exclusive extract to give you a taste of the book - find it at the bottom of the page. 

Here’s a brief reading guide to get you up to speed. Just in case this is your first book club:

• Free subscribers get a reading guide and an audio recording of the live event.

• Paid subscribers can join us live online for the discussion - a link and password will be posted in the Chat - and you can send in questions for Maggie by posting them in the comments. 

• If you can’t make it, a full replay will be available straight afterwards from the same link (or a little later in your podcast feed).

• You don’t have to read the book to attend the event - but however you use it, hopefully the book club will inspire you to find some brilliant new books and authors!

About the book

Told in crisp vignettes, You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a memoir about the unravelling of a marriage, and the making of a new life. 

As the viral success of Maggie Smith’s poem, Good Bones, changes her professional life, her home life begins to look unsteady. Slowly, and then all at once, her marriage collapses, and in the ensuing chaos she reaches out to find life again - a good life.; maybe even a beautiful one. 

In this extraordinary book, the reader is dipped into the sensation of aftermath itself, the past, present and future swirling around us. Certain themes rebound: infidelity, patriarchy, permission to be a successful woman. Feelings rise up, insurgent, and drag at us; but there is healing too, and the promise of newness. Smith is a realistic optimist: the world goes on, still 50 per cent terrible (a conservative estimate), but ravishing all the same. 

You Could Make This Place Beautiful has been a runaway bestseller, and it’s easy to see why. Anyone who has lived through a crisis - particularly a betrayal - will recognise the storm that is so deftly shown here. Despite it all, the story is full of unexpected sunshine. It’s a fable of how we survive. 

By You Could Make This Place Beautiful (US)

Buy You Could Make This Place Beautiful (UK)

Maggie Smith speaking about her book on NPR

Listen to Maggie’s interview on The Wintering Sessions

Subscribe to Maggie’s Substack, For Dear Life

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About Maggie Smith

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977, Maggie Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful; the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change; as well as Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Lamp of the Body. 

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I now thrilled to share with you this exclusive extract from You Could Make This Place Beautiful.

PINECONE

It was an unusual pinecone, the one my husband brought home from a business trip as a souvenir for our five-year-old son, Rhett. Like a small wooden grenade, I thought.

My son has always been one to collect what he calls "nature treasures" — pinecones, acorns, stones, flowers, shells. I find them when I empty his pockets, doing the laundry. I find them in my purses and coat pockets, where he's slipped them for me to find.

This pinecone, brought home to Ohio on an airplane, sat on one of our two dining room sideboards. We bought the pair years ago to house our white wedding dishes, the ones we'd registered for, because the serving platters and even the dinner plates were too large for our kitchen cabinets.

The house was built in 1925. It's periwinkle and white— periwinkle just like the crayon, likely an accident of paint that looked gray enough in the can. Built before central air-conditioning, the house has so many windows, and so few walls without them, we had no idea when we bought the house where we would put the couch or hang the large paintings.

There are so many windows, the house is lit naturally all day long, and you can follow the sunlight as it moves from the back of the house at sunrise to the front at sunset. There are so many windows, I couldn't bear to hang blinds or full curtain panels. With only café curtains covering the lower halves of all the windows, my head can be seen floating from room to room at night from the street. There are so many windows, living in this house is like living in a glass display case, especially after dark. There are few places to hide.

A few weeks after my husband returned from his latest business trip, one of a few trips he'd taken to the same city in recent months, something felt off. Something had shifted, maybe just slightly, but perceptibly.

One night he went to bed before me, and I stayed up late writing, sitting on the brown sectional sofa we'd had to float in the middle of the living room. The leather messenger bag he carried to work was sitting in its usual spot on a dining room chair, open, its unbuckled flap hanging over the back of the chair. 

Everyone was asleep in the house but me; even the dog, our brindle-and-white Boston terrier, Phoebe, was likely snoring on the couch. I call her "the marble rye" because of the way she looks like a dense loaf of bread when she's curled up.

Everyone was asleep, so no one was watching what I did next, but I felt watched. There are so many windows that someone walking by our house that night could've seen me from the front walk, but that wasn't what made me feel uneasy, nearly seasick, as if I'd just stepped off a boat. It was as if an omniscient narrator - the one I imagine now, the one whose knowledge I envy - was watching me as I set my laptop down and walked over to the chair. I cringe to think of it now - my hand reaching into the bag, rifling through the manila file folders and legal pads inside. I was - am - ashamed, yes, for snooping. Though I would be more ashamed if I had found nothing.

Nothing was not what I found.

There was a postcard. I saw a woman's name. An address in the city he'd been visiting for work. Her address. I read what he'd written to her. He didn't know what kind of pinecone it was, the one they'd picked up on their walk together.

After I read the postcard and slid it back into the bag where I'd found it, I kept looking. What else was there? I pulled out the blank book he kept in his bag, like the one I carry for jotting down ideas for poems, lists, phone numbers, funny things my kids say.

I flipped to the last entry, the one followed by blank pages. I wanted what I read there - the story of a walk, a woman, a house, her sleeping children upstairs - to be notes for a novel or a play he was working on. But I knew these weren't characters. They were people. I knew this wasn't fiction. It was his life. My life. Ours.

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Coming up at The Clearing for paid subscribers

There is no book club next month because I’m launching the paperback of Enchantment, and then going on holiday! To Japan!! I’m hoping to send you some travelogues full of cherry blossom.

Elissa Altman and I will be tackling your Creative Questions on Monday 18th March at 6pm.

As you may already know, I also run a Retreat Tier for people who’d like to take part in four online retreats per year. These three-hour sessions are slow, calm, nourishing moments for us to gather together, shut out the world, and rest. I provide some gentle reflective exercises, but the deepest value lies in the discussion that comes up as we meander our way through the session. It’s all about being in community for a while, and I really look forward to them. 

The next Retreat is happening on Saturday 24th February. To join us, you’ll need to upgrade to the Retreat Tier.

•  Saturday 24th February, 4pm - 7pm UK / 11am - 2pm ET / 8am - 11am PT

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Take care,

Katherine

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