You Could Make This Place Beautiful

I talk about Maggie Smith by quoting Seamus Heaney

One day this week I read Maggie Smith’s; ‘You Could Make This Place Beautiful’. I picked it up in the morning thinking I’d just make a start on it. All day I kept returning to it until in the early hours of the next morning I had finished it and lay awake with my head whirling with thoughts.

A memoir written through the collapse of her marriage and the ensuing divorce and yet not at all like that.

It’s simultaneously a breaking down and a building up, a creation borne out of destruction. It’s beautiful and sad, funny and sharply angry. It is also a love story, yet not at all like that. It spins so much tangible stuff out of absence and loss. It feels like watching a timelapse film of someone coming into being, over and over again in different ways. It’s haunting. It’s a ghost story, but not like that.

One of the reasons I stopped writing for such a long time was that I couldn’t figure out a way to write about things that were happening in my life that were not solely mine or even mostly mine, but which were deeply affecting me. Things that were shaping my day to day life to such a degree that if I left them out of my writing, there was nothing worth writing about left.

I had always relied on words to make me feel better, to help me make sense of things but what I was writing during this time made me feel worse. The more I wrote, the further away from myself I felt. Things are different now, but the question of how to write something that is real enough to be helpful without being hurtful remains to be reckoned with.

Reading this book provided me with a lot of answers.

Smith’s exploration of how to write about the realities of a divorce when you have children with someone, and those children still love and have a relationship with that someone that needs preserving, is blisteringly acute. How do you negotiate the truth of your own feelings alongside the delicate truth of your children’s feelings? How do you work out how to stabilise the loving, nurturing mother part of you whilst simultaneously wanting to burn everything to the ground? How do you grieve what you have lost and continue to lose, while holding a safe space for your kids and figuring out how to build a new life and a new self? How do you process your anger and betrayal at the behaviour of someone else whilst also processing your anger and sense of betrayal at yourself for your part in things?

Smith attempts and articulates all these things. Sometimes more than once. These moments tend to cycle round, requiring our attention, our ability to step back, our ability to step up and our ability to keep learning, over and over again. She writes so well about the frustrations of having to repeatedly engage with things that should be done, or easy, or at least tolerable. There were times when I was nodding so hard my neck began to ache.

Smith’s day job is as a poet. Here, in prose, she still uses words like the poetry I love best, the stuff that takes something ordinary and illuminates it to show the magic humming away inside. As I was reading this book I was haunted by the thought that this was so like the heartbreaking beauty and sheer agony of the Seamus Heaney poem:

When all the others were away at Mass

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.

They broke the silence, let fall one by one

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of water

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Smith has this Heanyesque ability, to twist the ordinary into the extraordinary. And better than Heaney, she does it as a woman, writing about a life I recognised in so many instances. She takes words and strips them down to their core, making images that bare the bones of a moment and take your breath away. There is so much life amongst the grief, so many of the moments of domesticity and mothering that become moments of sorrow or celebration in a few, glorious words.

There is a lot here about the process of writing, which is entwined with the process of becoming. There is a simultaneous making and unpicking of what makes this a story and the life of a woman and what it means to be yourself. There is becoming both in the words she says and the words she leaves unsaid.

There is also an enquiry into what is true and what is real.

At one point, in desperation, Smith consults an ‘emotional alchemist’. There is a moment where something uncanny happens during the consultation which leads Smith to question what, if anything to make of it. She says: ‘That clearing felt true even if now, in hindsight, I’m not sure it was real.’

This made me sit up. This is something I have been thinking about a lot in recent weeks. When I talk to my therapist about something that has happened, I think about the fact that other people who are involved will have a different story to tell about it. I often have to resist the idea that I need to qualify certain statements or stories by acknowledging that I am biased, or that I may be wrong or that I know ‘x’ will see this differently. I sometimes worry that I am lying and that I will be caught out. I think about the fact that by saying what I feel or putting my version of events forward, I often feel guilty of something. Sometimes that something is intangible. Sometimes that guilt is very real.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that I am being selfish or indulgent by talking about what is true for me. It takes a lot to hold my nerve and accept that it is ok for me to speak my truth, because that’s actually all I can do, and if I don’t speak my truth, who will? Sometimes I realise I don’t even know what my truth is. When I reach for the words, they aren’t there and I have to really dig deep to find them. For me, the last few years of trauma had silenced me in the ways that matter most to me. I lost myself because I couldn’t find my way through to what was true and what was real and I couldn’t figure out a way to say what was real without being so true that I destroyed more than I built. That’s quite a scary feeling, the not knowing coupled with the capacity for destruction.

I felt all of that so beautifully in Smith’s writing. It resonated with a deep, clanging ‘yesness’ within me. It woke me up to the fact that I can give myself permission to feel that something is true, even when, perhaps especially when I am not sure if it is real. Smith’s writing helped unlock something in me that will allow me to navigate myself further into being, and I’m so grateful.

I’ll leave the last words to her.

‘Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect. We all come into the world less than done, unfinished, our skulls still stitching themselves together. All wax and feathers, a mess of hope.

This is a story about magical thinking…

I was unfolding, learning to take up space. Life began to feel open enough, elastic enough, to contain whatever I might choose for it.’