You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

Interspersed throughout the memoir are chapters titled “The Play.” Examining her life through the medium of an imagined play allows her to observe rather than experience, viewing the timeline of her marriage through a third-person lens. The character that represents Maggie Smith is named at different points in the narrative as The Not-Yet-Wife, The Wife, The Mother, and The Finder. In the first identity, she is still only defined by her relationship to someone else. She attends a play her husband wrote. One of the characters learns that his wife is having an affair. Smith explains to the reader that the character of the woman is unable to see the foreshadowing in her own life, because people never notice foreshadowing in the plot of their own experience. Her new roles as a wife and mother strip her of her previous self, defining her identity by her relationships to others. She becomes The Finder when she discovers the postcard in her husband’s bag.

Smith’s divorce forces her to examine her life and to meet herself once more. Her connection to music is particularly revealing.