Proximity contaminates, warned the Roman poet Ovid. In his book on the art of love, Ovid urged others not to look at the source of passion. Writer Maggie Smith resists this strategy of avoidance in her poems and essays. Maintaining that tenderness is messy, love is painful, and life cannot afford to look away from the fire in the living room, Smith studies herself from the interior in her bestselling memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria, 2023).
The relationship between form and feeling feels fresh in this book about marriage, betrayal, divorce, parenting, and poetry. In a sense, it is always about poetry with Smith; everything returns to lyric and what the poem wants from the page.
Refusing the authority of a coolly detached narrative strategy, she risks being earnest and sincerely unsettled: “I lost my goddamn mind,” she writes at one point. By engaging anguish directly, Smith carves a space for the beautiful over the heart that holds initials alongside “forever.” Eschewing transition, she leaps from fury to levity, providing a thicker portrait of grief. She offers the reader a text that embodies its own tension, as exemplified in her note on plot, which challenges the literary trope of narrative arc. “I crave the answer to when it will end even more than the answer to how.” Smith writes, “We can endure anything if we know it will end.” The work of the poet continues in the relentless labor of facing and untangling emotion, but there are also ways in which the memoir form precludes that sort of reckoning.
Formally, Smith honors the complexity of her subject: the syntax skips, stutters, sighs—the punctuation marks stretch to the point of paratext. She makes formidable use of an asterisk and uses spoiler alerts as interjections. Repetition and anaphora attest to the banality of grief’s recursion, as in the repetition of certain titles like “Email, Subject Line: Update.” Musicality intrudes, shapes, and formulates possibility. Ancient Greeks used the word “autopoiesis” to designate a continuous inventing of the self where selfhood is intrinsically boundless or constantly shifting in order to acknowledge the new terrain.
Smith lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her “two favorite human beings,” namely, her daughter and her son. Her energy and light suffused the room as I spoke to her over Google Meet about memoir, boundaries, lineation, the punctuation of leaving things open, and the defiance of asserting a self that remains unfinished.
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The Rumpus: I wanted to start by acknowledging how much I appreciated the nonlinear, plot-refusing narrative structure of your memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
Maggie Smith: Sometimes life refuses us plot. Almost all the time.
Rumpus: You allude to this muddle of what it means to “write trauma in real time” literally, formally, and figuratively. One of those ways involves the sudden appearance of the ellipsis to punctuate statements. While the period designates closure, the ellipsis keeps things open.
Smith: Funny, I actually just found this in the notebook I kept at the time. I do all my writing longhand first. Even with this memoir, I wrote most of it longhand before typing it up, and I found the ellipsis part. On the page before, I can see that I was thinking about the tattoos people get of the semicolon. And [like with] Project Semicolon—the nonprofit whose tagline reads “A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence but chose not to”—the sentence hasn’t ended, and neither has your life. At the time, I didn’t feel like I was in a semicolon space. I felt amorphous, and an ellipsis was the first thing that came to me. An ellipsis can mean different things depending on where it is in the sentence. If it’s at the end of the sentence, it trails off, and you don’t really know what comes next. But an ellipsis mid-sentence elides something. It’s as if something has been removed or pulled out, and then you’re kind of writing around it or writing over it or past it.
Rumpus: In Robert Musil’s notebooks, the translator uses ellipses to indicate parts that are missing. Each ellipsis varies in its reason for exclusion. These dot-dot-dot spots gesturing toward what’s missing—whether due to redundancy, bad handwriting, untranslatability, or holding information back in the interests of Musil’s estate—burn through the center of his sentences, and you invoke a similar gesture in this memoir. You make it clear that there are things you’re not saying. You make it explicit by stating it repeatedly. I was wondering why you chose to make this relation to the unsaid so direct?
Smith: When I started addressing the reader directly, it was about intimacy. There is vulnerability in the content, so I wanted there to be intimacy in the telling. I didn’t want to imagine the readers as blank faces. What would happen if I told this story to one human being? Some of the boundary-setting came from this idea that, in handing the story to real people, they’re going to want to know more than I’m offering. My hope is that it comes across not as antagonistic toward the reader but as a sign of respect for the reader, which was my intention. If the stuff I’m not saying is the elephant in the room, I’m going to talk about that too. Maybe it’ll be a way to open up a conversation in the book about readers’ expectations from other people’s life writing. What do we think we’re owed?
Rumpus: That question lies at the heart of disappointment, right? We rarely express our expectations. Even in a novel, we want closure. Some of my favorite recent novels refused to sate my hunger for closure, and I love them for denying me that aura of wholeness, that tidying-up that closure performs on the page.
Smith: I think I am a little cynical about wholeness in the same way that I’m a little cynical about notions of healing or catharsis. Maybe you enter a book and you just want to hear what happened in a way that allows you to swim through it and go with the current and of what someone’s telling you, but I can’t offer this. It’s like rubbing against the grain—that’s where the phrase comes from. “It rubbed me the wrong way.” I realize it can make some readers uncomfortable, but I’m okay with that.
Rumpus: You reference your X—formerly Twitter—community directly when quoting someone who asked, “Well, how did all this bad stuff happen to you?” I’m intrigued by the intimate forms of address—i.e. your writing community, your peers, your readers—and the effect on us as readers.
Smith: The memoir is kind of a pastiche of different forms and different kinds of community and connectedness. Since I wrote so much of this coming out of peak pandemic shutdown, that’s all there was. The only literary community we had for a year plus was at a distance.
Rumpus: Thinking about the lyricism of the book, I wondered if you worked on poems while writing it.
Smith: Not really. I wrote most of this book in 2021, which is the year that Goldenrod came out, but I’d finished Goldenrod the year before. Every once in a while a poem would come to me, but honestly, because I was so focused on this book, I included ideas that would normally be a poem under any other circumstances in the italicized sections that begin with “how I picture it.” Each one explores a metaphor for what this experience felt like, and these prose-poemy pieces form their own thread in the memoir. If I hadn’t been writing a memoir, all of those sections probably would have turned into poems. I was cannibalizing my would-be poems for this book.
Rumpus: Although titling does significant work in framing and creating motion within the book, the book lacks a table of contents. How did you make formal decisions about titling and arrangement?
Smith: I didn’t format it with a table of contents because the chapters are so short and, in some cases, the titles are so long. I had a feeling it would look very unwieldy and a little nutty at the beginning of the book. When they poured the first draft, it automatically generated a table of contents that was four pages long. I didn’t want that to be the reader’s entry into the material. The trade-off is that I can’t find anything in this book. If I give a reading and someone asks me to read that one section about whatever, I’ll never find it. So, it is a little bit frustrating for me as a human being, but I didn’t want the welcome mat for the book to be four pages of titles. I really wanted the welcome mat to be that Emily Dickinson quote.
Rumpus: “Betrayal is neat,” you wrote. Betrayal makes for an easy story, a linear narrative. How did the shape of this book change over time, or did it? Were you committed to the nonlinear, discursive aspect from the beginning?
Smith: I never know where a piece of writing is going until I’m done with it. Even midstream, whether poem or essay, I’m interested to see where it goes. Initially, I started writing this book as a series of vignettes, and then I realized I wanted to talk about some things again, so then I looked for ways to space them out and create moments of return. I never imagined a version of this book that would be completely linear. This is the only version that ever existed, in variations of scramble or shuffle. Almost like a book of poems: from the first draft to the final version, it’s mostly the same poems, right? Some stuff may come out, or some new poems might go in, but ultimately the pieces are the same. It’s the order and the shaping and the sections, the framework, that changes.
Rumpus: I was moved by the presence of playlists as a form that organizes the moments of a life and creates multiple emotional resonances. Your “Quarantine Skate Club Playlist” established a new space in which to move during lockdown.
Smith: I knew I would talk about playlists. At one point, I asked Megan Stielstra if I could just put playlists in the book. And she said, “Well, look at all the other things you’re already doing. Is that really the most experimental thing that’s happening here?” Music is important to me. When I publish a book, I’ll share the playlist of songs I was listening to as I wrote it. But this is the first time I let a playlist live in the text. It’s like bringing in a little bit more of my real life—getting to be my full self on the page and not just my writer self or my mom self, or even my friend or daughter or spouse self, but my self-self, my impulse when alone. There is always music.
Rumpus: Social media—from X to Google maps—offers alternative ways of hearing ourselves think. Your interlocutors include the digital presence of self. For example, you tell Shutterfly to back off and quote X conversations with the Mountain Goats, and you also refer to a joking tweet about what you might have done to deserve this and then quote your reply, “I said out loud that I was happy.”
Smith: When this book first came out, someone asked me how conscious I was about my use of technology. It’s funny because technology is deeply embedded in our lives to the point that it’s not conscious at all. At one moment, I might be walking outside and taking in birdsong and looking at the trees and whatever and having a tech-free moment, but then the next thing it’s like, what do we do? We get a text or a news alert, or Shutterfly reminds us of what our life looked like ten years ago. In some ways, the book is a kind of time capsule because of the specific technology that’s referenced. It’s not a timeless book. In one hundred years, we won’t be doing these things the same way anymore.
Rumpus: Maybe growing up prior to the internet highlights the ephemerality of our daily lives. There is a way in which the playlists and apps become artifacts in your book. There is an artifactual intimacy at play.
Smith: I love that phrase. Yes—links break, websites shut down, publishers close. So at least if it’s in the book, it’s memorialized. Whatever lives between those two covers gets to be memorialized for better or for worse.
Rumpus: You mentioned the memorial function and then brought in a line from the marriage vow just now: “memorialized for better or for worse.”
Smith: If I were writing about this conversation, that would have struck me: “Oh, wow, I just used vow language.” I think it also strikes at the heart of what we want from the memorial.
Rumpus: The end of a marriage is grievous, it demands and enacts grief. You mentioned grieving “institutional knowledge” of shared space in the terrain that you all created together. and the challenge of grieving that loss without the only other person who knows it and shared it, namely, the ex. And I wondered how you prepared for the day when your kids read this book? If at all?
Smith: If my kids read this book someday, as adults, I don’t think the “plot” will surprise them. We share this life. The thing that I’m most concerned about them confronting is how much I suffered. Even as an adult, it would pain me a great deal to learn about my own parents’ pain.
Rumpus: Wanting to protect children from our suffering is part of that desire to keep things stable and normal for them. But this memoir also gives your kids certain opportunities to know you as a fellow human being, a person. Recalling my mother’s sharper statements about heterosexual relationships with men, I am struck by the gift of her honesty, even when this included my father. Her words enabled me to protect myself and to refuse the lure of the linear narrative. Belief is so seductive. You said something that stuck with me: “I crave the answer to when it will end even more than the answer to how.” I was curious about that line in relation to writing, or, finding where the poem stops speaking.
Smith: Most really painful things, whether they’re physically painful, like a run after you haven’t run for a long time, or like a terrible emotional time, make you think that if you can just get to the other side of it, things will be fine. Even if it hurts exquisitely, knowing it will only last twenty more minutes makes it bearable. I can do anything if I know I can see the other side of it. When I was describing this time period, I actually just couldn’t see any kind of horizon. The separation and divorce seemed like this endless, ongoing thing. But writing is different from living. Even when I’m writing about something painful, I never want it to end. It’s a celebration to turn in a book or finish a poem, but it comes with grief because this project, this little beast, has been your companion for sometimes years or at least many months, and you’ve grown together in your understanding. I’m never in a hurry for a piece of writing to wrap up. And I almost never know how it will end.
Rumpus: “These poems are mine,” you wrote. “I have sole custody of them.” After having my heart broken by that line, which speaks to the challenge of custody battles, I started wondering, do we actually have custody of our poems?
Smith: The custody of my children is probably more clearly delineated and durable than my custody of my poems. You’re right, I write a poem and roll it up and stick it in a bottle and float it out to sea, and then it’s not mine anymore. I have no idea what shore it will wash up on or who will reach down and pluck it up from the sand. I don’t even know if they’ll like it. I don’t know if they’ll throw it back. But while I’m working on a poem or a book, it’s mine. I do have sole custody over that thing. We are in close companionship. And then the thing happens that will happen with my children, too—they belong to the world. Maybe we are just temporary stewards of these people and these pieces of writing.
Rumpus: When a book is published, one has spoken it into the world, making it something that others can use against you, in the way one’s children can be used against you. I wonder if gender distributes these concerns differently?
Smith: I do think that our feelings can be weaponized against us. If someone hurts you or if you get angry, then those emotional responses are healthy and appropriate and yet, oftentimes, women are labeled hysterical or out of control. That’s not the language employed around men’s expressions of emotion. I think women are conditioned to temper it, lest we seem crazy, which is always what one will be called as a woman if you get too sad or too angry about anything, even if that response is completely appropriate. For every person who says, “I’m so glad you told this story, I feel so seen,” there will be someone who’s like “I cannot believe you aired this dirty laundry!”
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Author photograph courtesy of Maggie Nelson
