Reconceiving Our Lives (Maggie Smith)

“For people who have been in a long relationship and then it goes off the rails and ends, it’s a different kind of grief from say widower grief, right? Where maybe the relationship gets to stay intact and time capsuled. And you get to maintain the quality and texture of those memories even as you're grieving the loss of the person in your present life and in your future. And I think something that happens in divorce that we maybe don't talk enough about is the kind of like, I think they call it ambiguous grief, right? It's like losing someone who's still around, but not really, and not still around and available to you in the capacity that they once were. And so if you've been with someone for a really long time, you have all this institutional knowledge, right? Like all these private jokes and little songs, and it's like, who did I see? Oh, I remember seeing that movie. Who did I see that with? Oh, right. And it's like walking in a minefield…”

So says Maggie Smith, an incredible poet and teacher whose mastery of language is always stunning: She distills sentiments of motherhood, grief, and survival in a way that is equal parts relatable and beautiful. While she’s published poems that touch such a collective nerve they’ve gone viral—namely Good Bones—her newest offering is a memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. And in it, she not only breaks the traditional memoir format, but she also breaks open her relationship and the way we reimagine ourselves and our experiences as time passes. It is a beautiful book. Today, we discuss the ways that Maggie's memoir explores the disparity among gender roles and the collective damage caused by the patriarchy. Ultimately, through her story, she encourages us all to commit to a practice of self-love, introspection, and forgiveness.