I’m reading Maggie Smith’s memoir, _You Could Make this Place Beautiful_, tearing through it, really, which is probably the wrong approach, since it’s so poetic and each little vignette is dense — it should be savored. Maybe on the second reading.
It’s about the end of a marriage, and it’s a little surreal reading it, because there are certain resonances with my life. Smith’s life as a professional writer, as a mother — we’ve been to the same AWP conferences, had similar conversations with spouses about feeding the children while we’re away…
…and yet, it’s so different too. Obviously, I’ve never had a piece of writing go viral, the way her poem “Good Bones” did, which may have contributed to the end of her marriage, she says.
But more, Smith’s a different sort of mother than I am — more hands-on by nature, perhaps, more anxious, more aligned with cultural defaults of what good motherhood looks like. And Kevin is different from her husband. Very different. Among other things, and not the least thing, he takes my work as seriously as he takes his own work.
Yet there are definitely still bits of her I recognize in myself. Like this:
***
“In the beginning I told no one about the pinecone, the postcard, the notebook. I wanted to save my marriage, but I wanted to save it without anyone knowing it needed saving.
That is some serious firstborn-daughter energy right there.”
***
Heh. I dropped a lot of that impulse early on, I think, just walked away from it because I *could not*.
But I recognize it, and still occasionally have to fight through when it surges up.