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You Could Make This Place Beautiful
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Maggie Smith
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
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Publisher's summary
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NPR Best Book of the Year • Time Best Book of the Year • Oprah Daily Best Memoir of the Year
“A bittersweet study in both grief and joy.” —Time
“A sparklingly beautiful memoir-in-vignettes” (Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author) that explores coming of age in your middle age—from the bestselling poet and author of Keep Moving.
“Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.”
In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman’s personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is “extraordinary” (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.
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- By Erik Hermansen on 11-23-14
By: Meghan Daum
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The Natural Mother of the Child
- A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood
- By: Krys Malcolm Belc
- Narrated by: Krys Malcolm Belc
- Length: 4 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner Anna adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as "the natural mother of the child." The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family.
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Excellent
- By Kathryn Bradley on 03-04-23
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Chicken Soup for the Soul - Find Your Happiness
- 101 Inspirational Stories about Finding Your Purpose, Passion, and Joy
- By: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen
- Narrated by: Cynthia Barrett
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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What makes you happy? Others share how they found their passion, purpose, and joy in life in these 101 personal and exciting stories that are sure to inspire and encourage listeners to find their own happiness. Chicken Soup for the Soul: Find Your Happiness will encourage listeners to pursue their dreams, find their passion and seek joy in their life with its 101 personal and inspiring stories. This book continues Chicken Soup for the Soul’s focus on inspiration and hope, reminding us that we all can find our own happiness.
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I got even more depressed
- By Tom on 09-08-14
By: Jack Canfield, and others
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All of This
- A Memoir of Death and Desire
- By: Rebecca Woolf
- Narrated by: Rebecca Woolf
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, writer Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of forty-four, he died. In All of This, Woolf chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own.
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excellentt!
- By S. DAWN HANSCOM on 11-26-22
By: Rebecca Woolf
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Until I Say Good-Bye
- My Year of Living with Joy
- By: Susan Spencer-Wendel, Bret Witter
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Susan Spencer-Wendel's Until I Say Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy is a moving and inspirational memoir by a woman who makes the most of her final days after discovering she has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). After Spencer-Wendel, a celebrated journalist at the Palm Beach Post, learns of her diagnosis of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, she embarks on several adventures, traveling to several countries and sharing special experiences with loved ones.
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Until I Say Good-Bye is a paradox for me.
- By Bonny on 03-19-13
By: Susan Spencer-Wendel, and others
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Mother Daughter Me
- A Memoir
- By: Katie Hafner
- Narrated by: Katie Hafner
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a "year in Provence" with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoe, Katie's teenage daughter. Katie and Zoe had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a 77-year-old woman set in her ways....
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Listen and be swept away!
- By Barbara Quick on 06-02-22
By: Katie Hafner
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Powerful Collection
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Had me walking my dog just to keep listening
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My name is Betty. I have depression. I have passion. I have tits the size of printers. And also: I have a brain full of women. There’s Blanche VonF--kery, Ingrid St. Rash, and a host of others—some cowering in sweatpants, some howling plans for revolution, and one, oh God, and one . . . slowly vomiting up a crow? Worried for her. These women take turns at the wheel. That’s why I feel like a million selves. With a raised eyebrow and a soul-scalpel, I’d like to tell you how I got this way. Because maybe you feel this way too.
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[idk what to put here, but I love this book]
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This is not THAT Maggie Smith
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Megan Barnes' life is in free fall. After losing both her job as a reporter and her boyfriend in the same day, she retreats to Chicago and moves in with Helen, her overprotective mother. Before long, the two are clashing over everything, not to mention Helen's run for US Congress, which puts Megan's career on hold until after the election. Desperate to reboot her life, Megan gets her chance when an altercation at a campus rally brings her face-to-face with Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Jocelyn Jones, who offers her a job on her PR team.
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Had me walking my dog just to keep listening
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My name is Betty. I have depression. I have passion. I have tits the size of printers. And also: I have a brain full of women. There’s Blanche VonF--kery, Ingrid St. Rash, and a host of others—some cowering in sweatpants, some howling plans for revolution, and one, oh God, and one . . . slowly vomiting up a crow? Worried for her. These women take turns at the wheel. That’s why I feel like a million selves. With a raised eyebrow and a soul-scalpel, I’d like to tell you how I got this way. Because maybe you feel this way too.
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[idk what to put here, but I love this book]
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Very disappointing
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Not quite what I expected
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Even the greatest minds in medicine have been terribly, terribly wrong. Boneheads and Brainiacs profiles the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine from 1901 to 1950 - a surprisingly diverse group of racists, cranks, and opportunists, as well as heroes, geniuses, and selfless benefactors of humanity. Forget all the ivory tower stereotypes of white-coated doctors finding miracle cures. Boneheads and Brainiacs reveals the messy human reality behind medical progress, in a highly entertaining audiobook for the ordinary listener.
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Riveting!
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Resilient little girl!
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This American Ex-Wife
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He seems like a typical 16-year-old boy except that Mikey is walking the knife edge of crime. He’s tough and good with his fists, but when journalist Shane Dunphy is offered the chance to write his story, he discovers a lost, vulnerable child, in danger and desperate for help. Shane descends into the perilous underworld of organised crime and discovers that the glamour of gangland life is riven with brutality and murder. Far from providing a means of survival for boys from broken families, the price they pay is often with their life.
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Bon Bons to Yoga Pants
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Lexie Greene has always had such a pretty face. Unfortunately, that's where it seemed to stop. She's grown up hearing her mother constantly remind her that she needs to lose weight.. And 22-year-old Lexie knows she's overweight. With her younger sister's wedding on the horizon and a crush to stalk on Facebook, Lexie's had enough. She gives up her constant daydreams about food and joins a dieting group.
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fun book
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Twenty-one-year-old Linda Kovic needs to learn a language fast in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a flight attendant, so she contracts to become an au pair for a wealthy family in the Loire Valley. In order to secure the nanny position, she lies on her application and pretends to speak French, confident she'll be forgiven once she arrives at her destination. This book captures Linda's real-life story inside and outside the Chateau de Montclair, detailing her challenges and triumphs as she tries to adjust to her new life.
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Living in France without speaking the language
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After years of hiding her addiction from everyone—stockpiling pills in her Louboutins and elaborately scheduling her withdrawals between PTA meetings, baby showers, and tennis matches—Laura Cathcart Robbins is running out of places to hide. She has learned the hard way that even her high-profile marriage and Hollywood lifestyle can’t protect her from the pain she’s keeping bottled up inside. Facing divorce, the possibility of a custody battle, and the insistent voice of internalized racism that nags at her as a Black woman in a white world, Laura wonders just how much more she can take.
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Best Mom/wife alcoholism memoir I’ve read
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What listeners say about You Could Make This Place Beautiful
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dusty Rhoades
- 02-18-24
I Could Read This Book Over and Over
I love to read books about overcoming adversity, struggling through grievous situations. It's even better when the heroine, yes, HEROINE, comes out on the other side with great takeaways that stay with you well beyond the span of the book.
Once I started reading this book, I couldn't put it down. I didn't want it to end. And, now that it's over, I already want to read it again.
When a vicious betrayal upends her life, Smith's finds a way forward. Surviving such pain could be trite in the hands of a lesser writer, but Smith's a masterful storyteller.
Smith's grace-under-pressure demeanor offers intelligence, wit and stoicism as she reclaims her life in this intimate and emotional journey. I doubt there's a woman out there who can't relate. I cheered for her every step of the way, and she didn't disappoint.
It wasn't revenge, posturing and rancor that won, it was a creative reframe of life, strengths, and life lessons that made the outcome so uplifting and deeply satisfying.
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1 person found this helpful
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- M.S. Lynch
- 06-07-23
Rhythmic storytelling
I’ve never read a memoir like this one by Maggie Smith. It unfolds, doubled back, echoes, reaffirms, and returns to itself most beautifully. As a person who has been married for decades, I understand so much in this book. I recommend.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Maritza Coscarelli
- 08-13-23
Truth
« Pain changes us. » I know this and so much in this beautiful, painful and hopeful
memoir to be true. Thank you, Maggie Smith for writing this. Reader, this is line nothing you’ve ever read before or will ever read again. I think I will start it again, soon.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jennifer Keller
- 08-13-23
Beautifully written
A memoir like no other that I’ve read on relationships. Thank you Maggie for helping many of us caregivers.
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- jelaine lombardi
- 07-22-24
An honest account on divorce with children
Beautifully written and totally relatable! Thank you for inspiring me in the telling of my own story.
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- Betty Blue
- 04-16-23
Beautiful, relatable, profound
A story written with such grace, candor and quiet humor that you feel you know the author intimately, even though she doesn’t lay out every detail or run through every event line-by-line. The story doesn’t have a triumph-through-adversity arc; it is more like thought and rumination, circling, recursively touching on themes. l loved this shimmering, beautiful memoir.
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4 people found this helpful
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- MandyB
- 04-15-23
Beautiful
I would read anything she wrote. Beautiful writing, beautiful telling of a difficult story.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jylle
- 09-24-23
Beautifully Written
Anyone who has loved and lost and managed to live through it, recognizing the power they received on the other side, will be able to relate and, I assume, enjoy it as I did.
I was disappointed by the audio production; long pauses with some distortion made me reach to my phone, thinking something had gone wrong with my device. No. Just post-production editing. All in all, it is an enjoyable listen, and I recommend it
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1 person found this helpful
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- Pamela Andrews
- 05-21-23
Loved It
I loved the book. It was just what I needed at the perfect time in my life.
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- P Suarez
- 07-03-23
Excruciatingly beautiful!
The parallel between my story and hers is similar but not. However, somehow through exquisite articulation, Maggie expressed painful truths. Truths that I needed to marinade within. I respect what she shared and didn’t. The narration is exactly how it should be. I feel blessed to have experienced this amazing book. Thank you M for recommending this read!!
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