Maggie Smith, YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL: A Memoir

[1:51]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zippy Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books. This thirty minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, three hundred and sixty five days a year for about thirty minutes. I am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction and memoir. Our books are already out now. You can check it out on zippybooks.com. And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle features. That's at zippymag.com. We have classes at zippyclasses.com. And I recently opened a bookstore in LA called Zippy's Bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue at 11th Street in Santa Monica. I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings. But this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018. And no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing. Enjoy. Maggie Smith is the author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir. This is actually one of the book club picks that I have selected for Zibby's book club. You can go to Zibby'sbookclub.com and join the virtual club, or we're starting chapters all over the place. So if you are interested in starting a chapter, just go to the website, check it out, and fill out the quick form, and I will get back to you with a whole PDF of what you need to do next. We're really excited to be partnering with so many people. But, anyway, our club is going to be reading Maggie Smith's You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir. She is also the author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving, Notes on Lost, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Maggie has also received several individual excellence awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poet prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and the fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published appearing in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review of the Nation, the best American poetry, and more. Welcome, Maggie. Thanks for coming back on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to Discuss You Could Make This Place Beautiful memoir. I am so happy to be back. Thanks for having me. I have to say when I even heard that you had written a memoir, I was like, I can't wait to read this. And then I saw your gorgeous cover, which is, like, outstanding. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, so amazing. I'm sorry I don't have it in front of me. Yeah. But there it is. It's kinda beyond. And then I started reading it, and I could not stop. I was like, I'll just dip into it. That's why I thought this podcast was a while ago because I read it, like, as soon as the the advanced copy came, I was like, clearing the decks, have to read this, inhaled the whole thing. It was so good. Oh my gosh. So, anyway, congratulations. Absolutely loved it. Loved everything Thank about

[4:47]Maggie Smith: you. I love when I love when I hear that people like gulped. Gulped. Yes. Book down. So that's I'm glad I'm glad you did.

[4:56]Zibby Owens: See, there you go. Using the the nice language, you know, figuratively. So okay. Well, for those who have not maybe they aren't familiar with your poems, and maybe they haven't read the back cover, and they don't know what you could make this place beautiful. It's about could you explain it a little bit?

[5:12]Maggie Smith: Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm primarily a poet. I've been primarily a poet my whole my whole adult life, and yet not everything will fit inside a poem or at least not one of my poems, which tend to be pretty brief. So the memoir is, you know, maybe the best way to think about it is like my book Keep Moving was sort of about pressing forward through a really difficult time, which for me was my divorce, though it came out during the pandemic. So I think it was just a tough time for everyone. And this book is really more looking back and kind of a reckoning with the past and an attempt to find myself again and sort of recover myself in the process. You know, I think a lot of us wake up in middle age in particular and are sort of like, how did I get here? Like how? What? What choices or paths or forks in the road or opportunities I took or opportunities I didn't take led me to this particular point in my life. And for me, the memoir was about sort of reckoning with the end of my marriage and trying to figure out the who am I now piece, but also like the who have I always been peace, right? You know, I don't know. Think about the we talk a lot about midlife crisis as being a midlife thing. And the opposite of crisis is like recovery. So I think of this book as like a midlife recovery of self or return to self, which I think women in particular, I think a lot of us need that.

[6:56]Zibby Owens: Yeah. I like this idea of a reckoning because because it's like a midlife reckoning with who we are and where we've gone and what we can do with that spot now. Nowhere. Yeah. But a part a lot of your book felt very poetic. And that I mean, obviously, you can't like you can take the the poet out of a form or I don't know. Bad joke. But you know what I mean? Like, you you No. I'm with you. It's not a hat that I can, like, put on Yes. Or take off. Like, it's Right. I'm going to enter every piece of writing

[7:28]Maggie Smith: as a poet. So I write I probably write emails as a poet, Zibby, like I, you know, why why is she writing emails and couplets? Oh, she's she's a poet. So, yeah, I knew when I approached this book that I wasn't going to be doing it as someone else. I wasn't trying to think, Okay, well, how would a prose writer write this memoir? I was letting myself do it as a poet, which maybe helps explain

[7:56]Zibby Owens: the structure a little bit. So you decided to some of the chapters, if you will, are just short, like, sometimes even a line, two lines, three lines. And they all sort of some of the shortest ones seem to follow almost like their own conversation, and then you have longer ones that delve deeper into different scenes. So talk talk about the structure and if that just came as you started writing or how

[8:19]Maggie Smith: Yeah. I mean, there was no outline. I don't think I've ever I haven't outlined anything since, you know, high school, probably. But I I sort of wrote it piece by piece. And then at the end of sort of the the big first draft, I printed everything out and literally did what I do with collections of poems, which is spread the whole thing out on my living room floor. And I got colored markers, borrowed markers from my children and started to kind of color code the different strands in the book. So the sort of italicized, more poetic sections and the questions and the forward moving narrative, and then really tried to sort of leaf in all the different strands together so so that not one would sort of drop away for 50 pages and then surge back in. So there would kind of be these different breadcrumb trails for for the reader to follow. And you're right, I used a ton of white space in this book. I was joking that I made my publisher use a lot of paper and not a lot of ink in some ways because, you know, as a poet, I'm used to using white space as literal breathing room to kind of slow the reader down, and also as a space where the reader can stop and reflect and let an image or a line of dialogue or something just kind of resonate, you know, like after a bell has been rung and it kind of hums just to sit with things. And I knew I didn't want to spoon feed things to the reader. I wanted to like respect the reader's intelligence enough that I could hand them a, you know, four or five sentence or four or five paragraph or four or five page description of an event or an experience or a conversation or a therapy session or an internal monologue, and then let them make the connections and sit with it for a minute before moving on to the next thing.

[10:23]Zibby Owens: It's like prayer in a way. Doesn't it? It tends to reminds me of, you know, silent devotion now, and now we go to this and, you know, all those same sort of beats the service.

[10:34]Maggie Smith: I love that. I mean, because it's about having time to come to your own conclusions Yep. Too and think, okay, how does this ping off of even if it doesn't completely match or kind of rhyme with my experience? How does it sort of ping off of something that feels familiar to me? And I think if you're barreling through narratively, it's hard to give the reader time and space to kind of consider some of those things or the connections. And I wanted to be able to do that in the structure of the book.

[11:07]Zibby Owens: I feel like your book also deals just so so much with home and what what home means and what it looks like, what it feels like, who's in it, what that does to you at different times, like what different homes feel like? And then how do you look at them again from the present into the past? And like, what, you know, where is our home? What does that even mean? Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I think of

[11:34]Maggie Smith: I think we'd probably be better off thinking of ourselves as home so that no matter where we are, we are sort of grounded in a sense of, you know, self and an agency. But for me personally, I still basically live in my hometown. And so it's almost, you know, Central Ohio is sort of a character in this memoir. And, you know, I was saying to a friend recently, there are a lot of sort of like weirdly painful things that can happen when you stay in the same place for a long time and through major life changes. Right? Because you drive past a place and you remember being there with a certain person or you just even living in my house, which, you know, my kids have only lived in this house. And yet on the flip side of that, and for me, the trade off is absolutely worth it. I'm still with my people. So I still have Sunday dinner at my mom and dad's house where I lived from age six to age 18. Right? And my sisters and brothers in laws are still here. And if I lived in a new place and gave myself a fresh start so I didn't have constant reminders of the before times, I also wouldn't have neighbors showing up on my porch with cake when they know it's my first Christmas morning without my children here in the house. That was And and they're offering things to me. I mean, the the amount that I felt held by my community throughout the past few years. I mean, it's I can't even overstate it. It's it's enormous. Nobody gets through the tough stuff on their own steam alone. Like, really does. It takes a village to raise kids, and it takes a village to grieve and and overcome deep loss. And I feel really lucky to have have home to help me through it. It's amazing.

[13:32]Zibby Owens: Yeah. I remember I wrote this whole essay about divorce pain because I feel like it is such a raw, painful thing to have your kids and then not have them. You know, like to have them be out just out of grasp and know they're okay, but just like you're prevented from being with them by divorce in some way. And it's such a so many people feel this, moms, dads, you know, caregivers. And I didn't feel like it had been properly named. Like, why don't we talk about it? You know? Like, it's such a shared feeling and it's, you know, obviously not compared to like actually losing a child. You know, you can't compare it to all these big things, but it is sort of its own special breed of hell. Right? That feeling. When I read that in your your book, I was like, oh my gosh. I just like felt it through my bones, through everything.

[14:23]Maggie Smith: Yeah. It is. And there we don't really have a lot of a lot of names for different kinds of, you know, sort of ambiguous grief or anxiety. And I think, you know, divorce is one of those experiences where it's it's a loss, but not a loss. Right. You know, and it's like, how do you talk about it? I've been thinking a lot about this. It's like I used to say, I'm sorry when people announced their divorces, and I'm actually not saying that anymore unless they communicate a lot of grief and sadness that tells me that that's how I should be responding. But that's not necessarily everyone's sort of like emotional weather when they come out of their marriage isn't necessarily one of grief. And yet it's so complicated, especially if if there are kids involved. Like, no one sort of comes out unscathed from it.

[15:20]Zibby Owens: I had I had people just like a burst sorry for the sirens behind us, burst into tears when I told them about my divorce. And I realized very soon that it had nothing to do with me. This was all it was like, it was the biggest litmus test or Rorschacht or whatever. And when you share what how what their reactions are says much more about their own stuff. So I was telling all these people at the time and among my friend group, and this was, I don't know, almost ten years ago at this point, not quite that long, but, like, most of whom had not gotten divorced. And then I told this one woman, and she was like she didn't, like, get that sad face or anything. And she was just like, oh,

[16:03]Zibby Owens: And I was like, here's how I feel about it. You know? And then I found out she had been divorced. So so it came as no surprise to hear you say that. It's like, yes. As soon as you've been through it and you then you know what you're supposed to say, which, of course, always

[16:17]Maggie Smith: keeps seem seeming to be the case in times of bad times. I love that how do you feel about it? Like, let me let me hear your emotional response before I put my stuff on you. Exactly.

[16:28]Zibby Owens: Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I'm gonna I'm gonna borrow that if I can. You can borrow that. Okay. I'll tell her. I'll tell her. Thank you. Oh my gosh. I mean, how did you feel about I mean, there was a lot about your ex that had to be in this book. Right? That you how did you come to terms with that? How did you and he sort of feel like navigate that if at all? Like, how did you deal with all that? Not at all. I dealt with him on my own. And

[16:57]Maggie Smith: and really, I you know, my the key for me is I can only speak for myself. Yep. You know, so I knew going into this project that I was going to be doing it, really focusing on my own experience and my own perspective and not ever speaking for anyone else or assuming what they might have thought or felt or putting words into anyone else's mouth because it's not a book about anyone except for me. So that was really the thing that sort of kept me grounded. It was how do I write about my life in a way that I'm doing so with honesty and integrity, but also honoring the fact that the way that I feel about this and would tell the story is not the story. Right. And I talk about that. I mean, actually, like in the first page of the book, it's like, I can only speak from my own experience. And so this is not a book about anyone else. This is a book about me. And we all have the right to write about our own experiences. And sometimes that involves writing about other people because they're they're in our lives.

[18:07]Zibby Owens: Yeah. Today's

[20:23]Zibby Owens: True. I also found it very interesting how you wrote in this book about your own success as an author and what how that impacted your relationships and your life. And you don't often get the interior glimpse of an author's success in their writing. So I loved getting that, you know, behind the scenes look of like, what did that feel like? How did that affect everybody? Maybe you could just talk a little about that time and what that was like.

[20:49]Maggie Smith: I mean, it's not uncomplicated. Right? And I think I do think this is gendered too. I think this is if you are the primary caregiver of young children, and your career takes off in some way, and it doesn't even need to be a creative career, it could be some big promotion at, you know, a quote unquote regular job, which, you know, I don't have a regular job. But I think that that in particular is something that I'm hearing is resonating with women in particular who were like, how am I supposed to do all of it? I mean, how am I supposed to be 100% taking care of the kids in the house and also honoring this other part of myself that is really important to me? And so that's something that I do kind of deep, you know, sort of dive deeply into in this book is it's not without a cost, right? Like the good things that you see happening to people aren't necessarily a 100% good. There's like oftentimes some other trade off or downside or complication because of it. And so when my poem Good Bones went viral and I started having the opportunity to travel more for readings or book festivals or I mean, know, you know how this is. Question then became, well, if I've been home with the kids all this time, then what happens to the kids for the few days a month that I need to be gone? And how is that handled? And, you know, it's heartening to me that I see it being handled pretty well in a lot of households. You know, I have a lot of writer friends. You have a lot of writer friends. And I see a lot of like rallying and support. And I see people being encouraged to live to their full potential and see where things can go. And, you know, be free to do that. And unfortunately, I also see and felt the opposite, which is it can be really inconvenient if you are accustomed to being around and available for you not to be around and available. So It's a big shift.

[23:14]Zibby Owens: It's a shift. I mean, every it's still a change. Like, any

[23:19]Maggie Smith: big great thing is still a thing that, like, shakes the foundation of stuff. Whether it's in a good way or a bad way, things are moved and displaced a bit, and they have to, like, resettle in a new place, in a new way. Yeah. Like a like a snow globe. And I think we we recognize that when we know it's bad news, right? Like someone loses their job or someone is evicted from their home or there's a death in the family and that person was the primary breadwinner. And we know to recognize how really sort of traumatic upheaval and bad news can shake a family. But I don't know that we talk enough about like how somebody's good news can be somebody else's bad news. Right. And that's I mean, that's the that's the hard thing to to reckon with in a family system where you want to think that one person's good news is everybody's win. Yep. And it's not always that way.

[24:15]Zibby Owens: So true. It has sort of like a star is born undertones. You know, I watched that movie recently. Oh my god. So good. Good. All both of them. So good. I I mean, I actually I should admit. I have not actually seen the original one. Is that terrible? The original is good.

[24:31]Maggie Smith: I know. I have to go. Yeah. Okay. That's your homework now. I know. I know. With all your with all your free time, watch the original and report back.

[24:38]Zibby Owens: Every so often, I just completely crash though. And that's and I'm like, I have to just watch the thing or, you know and then I'm like, well, what to watch? And then I get all stressed. And I'm like, I just shouldn't even relax. Now you now you have a default answer. If you need something to watch, there you go. Yeah. What do you do when you're like totally crashing and stressed? Do you watch movies?

[24:58]Maggie Smith: TV? You know, it's funny. I don't actually watch TV generally. I'm not a TV person. I'm more of a music and book person. But when my brain is just sort of mush because I've like just like my output is at a max and I don't feel like I can absorb too much. My my really soothing thing is to watch TV. I've already watched like start over Peaky Blinders again at first season or start over six feet under again at the first season. So then it's not new to me. I'm not super invested. I can get up and change the laundry or make myself a sandwich, and I don't have to pause it because I've been through this all. But there's something like oddly or even like old law and order franchises, any of them. I've seen it. It's formulaic, and somehow it's soothing to just reengage with some chips or some ice cream.

[25:55]Zibby Owens: I feel the same about sex in the city. I'm like, I've seen every episode probably twice, 20 times. I don't know. And so I could just put it on, and I feel like I'm with my old friends again. I'm like, I I I'm not alone in it then. See. That's so funny.

[26:11]Maggie Smith: What are you writing now? What am I writing now? Well, poems when they come. And I'm so glad. Like, every time one shows up and sort of taps on the window, I'm just like, I thought the last one was the last one. I'm so happy to see you. So poems, slowly, you know, it just I can't force it. I just have to wait for them to come to me. It's like a small wild creature. Like if you if you move too fast, you'll startle it and it'll run back into the woods. So so I have to sort of just like sit with my palms open and hope they hope they arrive and like don't find me intimidating. So poems and then I mean, the next book I have out is actually a picture book, which will be out next winter. And mercifully, I did not illustrate it. So it's not just like sharpied stick people. It's gorgeous. And so, so yeah, so I'm waiting for that to happen and continuing to write poems and build build the next collection sort of poem by poem as as often as I can coax them away from the trees and toward me in the clearing.

[27:19]Zibby Owens: Oh, what is the picture book called?

[27:22]Maggie Smith: It's called My Thoughts Have Wings. It's coming out with Harper Collins, I think on my birthday next year, which they didn't even know. But I think it's tentatively my birthday next February. And it's it's really a sort of anxiety bedtime story for kids when you when you have those difficult tuck ins and your kid says something like, I'm trying to think good thoughts, but the bad thoughts keep kind of shoving them out of the way. Or I'm trying to relax, but I'm worried about what if what about gym tomorrow? And what about my tests? And what if I don't make the soccer team? And what if, what if, what if, which frankly, we all do. I could use an anti anxiety bedtime story myself. Most nights I'd probably get more rest. And so it's really about filling yourself up with good thoughts right before sleep.

[28:21]Zibby Owens: Wow. I need that personally. I have one child in particular who needs that. I can't wait for that. Yeah. So you will be helping a lot of families. I know. I feel like it's so unfair that bedtime is when you're, like, at your most tired and it's the most challenging

[28:35]Maggie Smith: part of the day. It really is. And I think, you know, kids kids are like us, which is they're busy during the day. So they're, you know, they're occupied. They're playing, they're in school, they're doing sports, they're doing homework. They're, you know, busy, busy, busy talking with people. And then as soon as you lie down and your mind is quiet, that's when the little whirr kicks up. Because then you have all this time and space to start ruminating and fretting. And, you know, we do it and they do it. So it's really about kind of a strategy I came up with, my son to kind of calm him and get him sort of uplifted before bed. Interesting.

[29:18]Zibby Owens: I keep trying the same thing that I think my mom told me and probably told her, which like it's going to seem better in the morning. Like, things in the night get so magnified. I guarantee when you wake up, this problem will seem really small again. But right now, it's like this funhouse mirror has made it seem so huge and

[29:38]Maggie Smith: it won't be as bad as you think. Oh, that's so true. I mean, I'm always telling my kids like, imagine the giant timeline of your life. Yes. So like this one quiz in eighth grade math, you probably won't remember it next year. You definitely won't remember it in five years. It's actually not going to impact your life at all. Like none of this. Pretty much none of this matters. Like the way that you treat yourself and the way that you treat other people matters. But like all of this other stuff, if you zoom up and out, it is like such a tiny dot on the big timeline. And none of this makes a difference. I don't remember anything really about eighth grade except for a bad home perm. Right? So it's fine.

[30:27]Zibby Owens: I say that too. I'm like, in the grand scheme of things, on a scale of one to 10, how important is this? Like, really think about it. Like, when you look back, is this a 10? Or is like this fight you're having right now really like a one? And they're like, okay. It's like a 2.2. And I'm like, great. Okay. Yep. Perspective. The gift that keeps on giving. Yes. Need it. I need it myself a lot of the time, though. Yeah. How important is this afternoon of work. I don't know. Probably not important. But Yeah. Maybe you should just turn on a star is born and relax.

[30:58]Maggie Smith: Yeah.

[31:01]Zibby Owens: Maybe. Cut it cut it all off. Sorry. Out of office. My family. Anyway, so funny. And are you reading anything good? Do you and do you have a memoir that you love? Because your memoir is such a different form from other memoirs. Are there memoirs you've kind of turned to or that you love or you're reading now or any of that? Yes, for sure. I mean, I wrote something on my substack recently about books as permission slips. Like the idea that you read these books that are doing something differently,

[31:30]Maggie Smith: like innovating stylistically or maybe just really going there content wise. And you're like, oh, so you can do this? If they can do this, then I can do this thing that I'm that I'm attempting. And so there were a lot of books for me as I was writing. You could make this place beautiful that acted as permission slips either in former content, The Chronology of Water, Lydia Yukhnovich. Oh my gosh. That book. Motherland by Alyssa Altman.

[32:01]Zibby Owens: Oh my love gosh. That book.

[32:04]Maggie Smith: That book. Yeah. Carmen Maria Machado's in the Dream House, which is almost like prose poetry. And it's sort of like repetitive form. And so I mean, there were lots of them. But reading all of these books a lot by poets in particular, people who were taking risks gave me the sort of like shot of bravery to be like, Okay, like my book doesn't need to look like everyone else's book. And in fact, if it doesn't, maybe it will at some point someday into the future serve as a kind of permission slip for another writer who wants to tell a story and isn't quite sure how to do it. And they'll say, oh, well, this book does it in this way. That gives me permission to to take some chances.

[32:47]Zibby Owens: That's kind of what art is really. I mean, not to you be know, everything builds on something before it a little, but then it like adds to the conversation in a new way. And that's how it all propels forward.

[32:59]Maggie Smith: A 100. Yeah. So it's like, you know, I kind of feel like every book I've written has been sort of in part of a bigger conversation. Yep. That I'm having both with myself and sort of with readers and with the world. And and so this is just a different part of part of that big conversation.

[33:17]Zibby Owens: I love, by the way, how sometimes you take poems apart and show all of us how the words you chose and, like, your markups of them. That is so cool. I love it.

[33:26]Maggie Smith: I'm so glad. I'm going to. You know, it's funny. I think in some ways, like, that impulse of sort of peeking behind the curtain and showing how a thing was made and writing a memoir are sort of a similar Those are similar impulses, I think, because they're both kind of vulnerable. Like, let me show you this thing. Yes. Like, let me show you how I made it. It didn't come out fully formed. It actually was really bad for a while before it got to be kind of good. And memoir is the same. It's sort of like vulnerable and also demystifying. I think like, let me show you what it's really like, which is not the veneer that you it's not what you think you know. Right. But you could make it beautiful. You could make it beautiful and and should if you can.

[34:17]Zibby Owens: Maggie, thank you so much. Thanks for talking. You know, I read this book, as I said, months ago, and it's it's like I just read it. Like, it's just seared in my mind. It's so powerful. And I don't know. It hits it was just it hit home for me in in a lot of ways, and I just loved it. And I'm so glad you're coming to book club and have more people read it, and not that you would have any trouble anyway, but I love sort of ushering in things that I'm, like, super passionate about. So this is one of those thanks.

[34:45]Maggie Smith: Thank you so much. Anyway. Alright. Thanks, Maggie. Have a great day. Thanks. You too. Alright. Bye bye.