You Could Make This Place Beautiful Audiobook By Maggie Smith cover art

You Could Make This Place Beautiful

A Memoir

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You Could Make This Place Beautiful

By: Maggie Smith
Narrated by: Maggie Smith
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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.

©2023 Maggie Smith. All rights reserved. (P)2023 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Motherhood Parenting & Families Relationships Memoir Heartfelt Inspiring Suspenseful
Beautiful Poetic Writing • Raw Emotional Honesty • Beautiful Narration • Powerful Personal Journey • Insightful Reflections
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Poetic writing and at many points insightful. Got tired of the repetitious whining. Cheered her growing strength and confidence

Beautifully written

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This book was a true gift to listen to. Thank you for your beautiful narrated insights and for sharing your raw, heartfelt, heartbreaking, heart awakening, authentic story, Maggie Smith.

I went through a divorce around the same time frame as you, and you expressed thoughts and feelings that I couldn’t quite find the words for. You have lent me your words, language and images and they have helped me with another layer of healing. I am grateful to you for writing this book and I highly recommend it for those who are started a new chapter in their lives.

Raw, Heartfelt and Healing

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Real, honest, encouraging & contented.
Thank you for this and your other works as well.
Thank you

Real, honest, encouraging & contented

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Every detail of emotions and complexities of what divorce feels like to a family and how one repairs their heart.

Great book for those who have or will go through divorce

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Dear Maggie, I love the Mountain Goats.
This book isn’t really about divorce, so don’t fear your own darkness and turn away too soon. It’s about unearthing a version of yourself that has been quietly mysteriously defiantly becoming without your knowing. And not in the lovely flower to behold kind of way, but instead in a complex honest unimaginable universal expanding sort of way.

The plot line is a vehicle for so much more

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So very predictable & real & plain that it was redundant and sad for me who has had so many friends, and myself to some degree, walk this sad thing that is a devalued, powerless, pathetic mother-wife plight. Ugh

Important story to be told, but…

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I just can't get on board with the fatalistic attitude of the kids being inherently shortchanged... not in *this* story! Kinda ruins any sense of real perspective on the part of the author IMO. Almost (undeservingly) self-depricating. Though the ending redeems this aspect to a pretty fair degree, I wonder if author considered the irony in the better part of the book presenting as solidly anti-feminist? Maybe that's part of the point... idk, I didn't like it... until the end. Glad I kept reading!

Bravely done, beautifully written, a bit confusing on underlying messages

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Maggie Smith wields her poet powers of words and metaphors in this book that offers nourishment for readers who seek healing and demonstrates possibilities for those who are fearful to try. I appreciate and respect her ability to be so openly vulnerable while honoring privacy.

Poetic Storytelling

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A book I will share with many. So beautifully written and read. Thank you Maggie

Yao beautifully written

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Such a beautiful and powerful book. What a beautiful and powerful woman. I joy to listen to.

Stunningly beautiful

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