Early & Alone #91: You Could Make This Place Beautiful

On writing about divorce

Early on in You Could Make This Place Beautiful, the poet Maggie Smith’s memoir about her divorce, she writes, “This isn’t a tell-all because ‘all’ is something we can’t access…This is a tell-mine, and the mine keeps changing, because I keep changing.” I appreciate this framing, underlined the sentence. We can only ever know our own experience, our own memories, our own logic. And when your story involves another person, there is no one truth.

At the beginning, I found myself underlining and starring certain passages, nodding because Smith was giving voice to a lot of feelings I’ve had about my own divorce, though the circumstances of our marriages and divorces were very different—she was married for over a decade, with two kids, while I was married for a little over a year, no kids. Just as in relationships, every divorce is different. And yet, there are certain pains that are near universal, I’d guess. But again, I can only know my own experience.

For me, Smith’s memoir fell apart as I read because it got repetitive and I could never quite place myself in time. She would write things like, “Reader, I’m not going to give you that scene. Why do you want it?” and I felt scolded, as though I’d been found going through her trash. It left a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

I saw a friend’s review of the book on Goodreads, and they agreed—they weren’t a fan of the book. In fact, they went so far as to write that we generally don’t need divorce memoirs. That sentence has been echoing in my head since I read it yesterday. Their point was that most divorce memoirs seem like they have an ax to grind, that the ex is often rendered as a one-dimensional villain.

Unfortunately, I do think Smith’s memoir falls into this trap. There are brief flashes of their relationship in better times, but we never quite get a picture of who this man was that she loved for so long. We only see his flaws, his callousness, his pettiness and jealousies. Without knowing why she loved him, what she loved about him, it’s harder to appreciate the fullness of her pain.

One of the parts I starred in the book is when she writes, “We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go…Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence.” I feel that. It might be buried down deep, but it’s there, that version of myself.

But back to divorce memoirs, divorce stories. Perhaps I am biased. Perhaps I have too much skin in this game. But I wholeheartedly disagree that divorce stories are stories we generally do not need. We DO need them. Not only because we need all kinds of stories to be able to understand the full fabric of human experience (later that same day, I underlined this from Melissa Febos’ Body Work, “The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.”), but because divorce is still taboo. And sometimes when you’re going through a divorce, especially at a young age, like I did, you can feel more alone than you’ve ever felt in your entire life. It’s one of the most isolating experiences a person can have. Reading another person’s experience isn’t going to heal the pain, but it can at least help to give voice to it, to help you feel a little less alone.

Seeing that comment on Goodreads brought back the voice of an instructor I had in a nonfiction writing class I took less than a year after my divorce was finalized. The class was called “6 Weeks, 6 Essays” and it was just what it sounds like—we wrote a brief essay every week, then shared them with the class. Of the six essays I wrote for that class, I believe four of them were related to my divorce. At one point, the instructor (a man) suggested that I try writing about “something other than my divorce.” I think I had to pick my jaw up from off the floor. He also told another woman in the class (we were all women except for him) that the breakup she’d written about didn’t sound like “that big a deal” so he didn’t get why she was writing about it.

Listen, he kind of sucked. But I’ve heard his voice for years, every time I write about my divorce. I worry, “Are people sick of this? I was only married for a year, I should just get over it. This is so dumb. Why would anyone care about a straight white lady whose husband cheated on her and left her…oldest story in the book.” Another thing Maggie and I have in common—we are both straight, white, cis, monogamous women. But we still have feelings and pain and stories worth telling. There’s room in the room.

There’s a note of defensiveness in You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and I understand it. Sometimes it felt like, reading it, Smith was fighting for her right to tell her story. It was difficult to tell if that defensiveness was meant for her ex, who did try to censor her writing in her telling, but it bled into a general feeling of “Hey, fuck you, I can write whatever I want!” I wanted to tell her, “Maggie, I know, I agree with you! That’s why I bought your book and I’m reading it!” But I guess I get it—there are lots of people who will say her story is boring, that her story isn’t needed, that she should keep her private life private. Those people have no business reading memoir then, in my opinion. Memoir is about telling your own story, in whatever way you like, even if it’s not universally loved or understood. There is someone out there who needs it.

Bright Spots

• I know I raved about The Bear season 2 in the last issue but I finished it and it’s one of my favorite seasons of television ever. Here’s a playlist of the soundtrack. I’ve been listening on repeat.

• I had never heard the band JOSEPH until recently but I’ve been loving them, too.

• I made this zucchini butter pasta last week (I added shrimp) and it was really good—good way to use up some of that abundant summer zucchini!

• If you’re into Laura Ingalls Wilder, I’ve been enjoying the new podcast called Wilder.