67 pages • 2-hour read
You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir
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Pages 1-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 1-13 Summary
Prologue
Before the first page, Maggie Smith opens with a quote from Emily Dickinson: “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” In the prologue, she explains that the book is her attempt to do what Dickinson describes—to pursue discovery. She acknowledges that she can only provide her history through her personal lens. The book will detail her stumble through darkness and the beauty she found during a difficult period in her life.
Smith’s husband returns from a business trip with a pinecone for their five-year-old son. His business trips have become more frequent. Smith describes the house she lives in with her husband and son. It has so many windows it makes her feel as though her life is on display. When her husband goes to bed, she reaches into his bag and pulls out his papers. She is ashamed of the act, but her suspicion takes hold. She finds a postcard written from her husband to a woman in which he references finding the pinecone together and a notebook in which her husband has written about the woman, their walk together, and her sleeping children upstairs. Smith describes this discovery as a before-and-after moment.
Postcard
After finding the postcard, Smith looks up the woman, whom she calls The Addressee, on the internet. Then she walks upstairs and wakes her husband by saying the woman’s name aloud. The rest of the details of their conversation are too fuzzy for Smith to recall.
Grenade
The following night, Smith checks her husband’s bag again. The pages from his journal in which he has written about the woman have been carefully removed from the book. Smith throws the pinecone away.
A Note on Conventions
Smith considers why she has chosen to write a memoir rather than novelize her life. She tells the same story of finding the postcard again from a third-person perspective. Smith does not tell her husband she found the notebook. She wants him to confess it to her. She feels she cannot novelize her experience, because the choice she makes to say nothing is a common tale. It is her reality, and she must confront it.
Sleight of Hand
Smith waits for her husband to tell her the truth, but he never does. His story changes over time, but he never offers her his confession.
Some People Ask
When people ask Smith why her marriage ended, she feels overwhelmed by the nuanced history that led to it. There is too much to tell, so she simply states that they grew apart.
A Friend Says Every Book Begins with an Unanswerable Question
This chapter title is repeated throughout the memoir, each time with a different question. Smith toggles between prose and poetry. In this version, Smith asks, “Then what is mine? / how to carry this” (11).
A Note on Setting
Smith lives in Bexley, Ohio, and she remarks that she is tied to this place and its history. She lives a short drive from her childhood home, and each Sunday she gathers with her family for a meal.
Pages 14-30 Summary
How It Began
Smith meets her husband in an advanced creative writing workshop when they are both young. When she leaves college and moves back home, they stay in touch through letters and postcards. Smith’s husband writes plays. One is staged at a festival: It tells the story of a husband who discovers that his wife is having an affair.
The Play
Smith tells the story of her experience again, this time describing it as a play. The husband and a woman take a walk and find a pinecone. This happens off stage, before the play begins. When The Wife discovers that her husband is having an affair, she loses her knowledge about her own future and what it may look like.
A Note on Plot
True life does not have a perfect plot that adheres to the conventions of rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
There’s Kubrick, and Then There’s This
Smith is unbothered by her inability to understand the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. What she wants instead is to understand her own life.
Living in Sin
When young Smith and her husband move in together, her parents are not pleased. During their first night in their new apartment, Smith stands next to the window while talking to her mother on the phone. She is struck by lightning.
Smith then breaks from chapter titles and invites the reader to consider a person as a metaphor for a nesting doll. Each doll inside is representative of a former self. Each person carries many versions of their former selves.
A Note on Foreshadowing
Smith remarks that life is full of foreshadowing, but people do not look for it in real life the way they look for it in stories.
The Play
When Smith refers to what happened through the lens of play, she refers to The Wife as The Finder. After the discovery, The Finder starts writing prose as a way to process her trauma while living through it.
Half-Double
After college, Smith teaches creative writing at a local college. When the couple moves closer to Smith’s family, she begins working as an editor for a children’s book publisher. They live in a half-double. On the weekends, she and her husband sit in a coffee shop together, writing side by side.
A Note on Foreshadowing
When Smith and her partner were young, her partner did not want to get married or have kids. Smith finds a poem she wrote when they were young and recognizes foreshadowing in it.
After Reading “Mock Orange”
The poem referenced in the previous chapter, published in Smith’s first work of poetry Lamp of the Body, acts as foreshadowing for Smith’s later divorce. In the poem, she explains that she recognizes their relationship will one day end.
A Friend Says Every Book Begins with an Unanswerable Question
In this chapter, the question changes: “how to set it down” (30).
Pages 1-30 Analysis
Smith uses a unique structure for her memoir. Each chapter is short, offering only snippets of images and conversations. She interweaves quotes and poetry into the narrative. Many chapter titles are repeated, a literary technique that helps to develop theme and symbolism. Though the book itself is a prose memoir, Smith also imagines how she would tell her story in the form of a play or a novel. Each provides a different contextual understanding to Smith’s experience.
Smith’s amnesia from her first discussion with her husband about his affair hides an element of her story from the reader. However, this loss of memory also conceals a part of the story from Smith herself. Experimenting with other literary forms in the memoir allows the author and the reader to develop a deeper understanding of the story. In the Prologue, the author explains to the reader that she will never be able to write a “tell-all,” because she can only speak about events through the lens of her personal understanding. When she plays with the idea of novelizing her story, the reader learns that Smith never openly confronted her husband about finding the postcard and the journal. She tries to make her husband confess to her, wanting him to be the one to reveal the truth.
In the play version, she redefines her role, moving from “The Wife” to “The Finder.” The role of The Wife is a trope, appearing in many narratives about women with cheating husbands. The Finder is a woman whose story does not end when the marriage does. The curtain stays open. Smith acknowledges her divorce to her reader at the beginning of the memoir: “That night, standing in my dining room, then our dining room, in the house where we lived, the house where I still live with our children” (6). Beginning with the divorce sends a message to the reader: This is a story about a woman after loss. Her life keeps going even though her marriage has ended.
Approaching her experience in several different ways contributes to the theme Divorce and Self-Discovery. Smith’s divorce serves as a catalyst for her learning more about herself and understanding her history and her future. She writes consistently about Divorce as Loss: The discovery of the postcard fills her with a sense of loss. Her grief is both for the end of her marriage and the loss of her knowledge about her own future. Suddenly, the path ahead of her is rife with uncertainty. Instead of living out a future defined by her relationship, she must now reconstruct her future based upon what she wants.
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