In 2018, Maggie Smith, a poet and essayist from Columbus, Ohio, discovered that her husband was having an affair. He had just got back from a business trip, and something felt off between them; a barely perceptible change of temperature. So she did that awful thing, and looked inside his messenger bag, its unbuckled flap irresistible once he was safely in bed. Naturally, she hoped to find nothing. But alas, nothing was not what she found. She pulled out a postcard, on which her husband described a walk, and a pine cone found on that walk – the very same pine cone he’d given to their son on his return that evening. Also on the postcard: a woman’s name, and an address in the city he’d just left. The pine cone, it turned out, was a hand grenade.
Smith was devastated. But writers write, and in the years since this detonation, she has made full use of it, material-wise. In 2020, she published Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity and Change, a book inspired by the daily “notes to self” she shared on social media during her divorce. This was followed, in 2021, by Keep Moving: The Journal, an invitation to “use the healing power of writing” to see change as “an opportunity for transformation”. And now here’s a third book: a memoir (of sorts) called You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Please don’t fall into the trap of thinking that all this has been easy for her, however. Her new book has, Smith insists, cost her terribly at moments: all that honesty and vulnerability. She’s wrung out! As she tells her shrink, how much easier it would have been to write a divorce novel instead, one like Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.
In your dreams, honey. While Heartburn, so funny and piercing, is a close to perfect book, the cloyingly titled You Could Make This Place Beautiful is all the bad things at once: self-pitying, but also self-regarding; incontinent, but also horribly coy; trite and mawkish and bulging with what even its author acknowledges as “woo” (Smith, who only turns down the chance to attend a “vision board workshop” for fear she’ll produce something that looks like a late Rothko, sees a “regular” therapist, an “intuitive therapist” and an “emotional alchemist”). How terrifying to open a book, and find a long enumeration of all the cute things her children have said (mostly about her). How horrifying, to see a writer unashamedly listing all their positive attributes (“[I am] as funny as hell”). Quotes from other writers – Joan Didion, Clive James – should alleviate the agony, but not even they can save her. Dishing up that famous line from Whitman – “I am large, I contain multitudes” – she can’t resist coming back at him with yet another of her humblebrags: “But here’s the thing, Walt… Sometimes I’m tired of my multitudes.” This line, like many others in the book, floats alone on a white page, the better that we might absorb its author’s wit and wisdom, all her beguiling contradictions.
Look, abandonment is an agony like no other. To be a lover who is not loved back necessitates language that feels both infinitely renewable (we try, and try again) and utterly redundant, and it’s this that makes it territory for the writer: impossible, universal, the ineluctable quest. But Smith’s book has nothing to do with all this, and not only because her prose is so grindingly workaday (for a poet, she’s surprisingly fond of non-lyrical terms such as primary caregiver). As the more glowing of the reviews suggested when it came out in the US, where this kind of stuff goes down rather better than here, its real subject is not loss, let alone humility or forgiveness. It is about self-love, and the (apparently) “beautiful work” involved in the struggle to achieve this.
Personally, I could find among its pages no evidence that Smith did not love herself plenty already. Her husband, she suggests, left her in part because he was envious of the “fame” that came her way when one of her poems went viral. But this isn’t really my point. Self-optimisation – self-adoration – is the great disease of our age, a social pathology that makes a virtue of a certain kind of narcissism, and scapegoats of everyone else, and this, in the end, is why Smith’s book repulsed me. Its true moral is inadvertent. Every page serves as a reminder that it is far, far better to understand yourself than to love yourself. Love should be reserved for other people, who will always need it much more than you do.
• You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
