Artistic Slipstreams

Thoughts on You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

Writing drapes experiences in structure and craft to costume up the mess with feathery or leaden purpose. Sometimes we get too real, uncomfortably, or even grossly raw. Sometimes we shy away from infusing meaning into the pain, instead controlling that ugliness because we are the art and vice versa.

It’s a tightrope walk to craft narratives that transform the human into stories just distinct enough from our lives and also just enough of our lives so that it works. 

Artists brace for impact from sharing more often than we admit, yet still expose ourselves to the menthol chill of scrutiny, hoping to conquer it with Truth. Or Story. Or an argument about how the two intertwine.

We know the work will be dissected with big rusty scalpels but hope there is something joyful -- barring that, profound – behind it. Too often, the work and the artist – because samesies, right? are treated like a reverse piñata: beat it enough and some delicious agony will fall out of, if not the art, then the artist. “Think of the labor, the agony behind this!” we say, or “Look at how they light the way through the darkness.” 

“She’s brave.”

We consume other’s pain, is what I’m saying. Pain seems honest, somehow more honest than joy to a lot of folks. Bring it on, bring on more. But do it right, otherwise it’s just awkward. Or, worse, boring.

Nevertheless, we continue. “Life is short,” we say, or if we’re feeling fancy, “I am compelled to create, or part of me shall perish.” We write (I’m focusing on that art form) for that distant reader we hope to impact, turning our private experiences into something public and well-thumbed.

This brings us to Maggie Smith and her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful. 

The author of the crazy-famous “Good Bones” walks the line between openness and withholding. Because you have to keep some, she argues, for her sake and the sake of her children and the sake of the art, even when there’s propulsion to explain. It takes a certain skill and a lot of moxie to do this well in a memoir, a medium where privacy is sometimes weakness and lack of privacy is also sometimes weakness.

She finds the sweet spot and is anything but sweet about it. Thank God.

Maggie Smith is a blazing talent. We know that. That already-juicy talent ripens with every page turn, so by the end, it is perfectly plump and almost too good to do anything but marvel at and invite others to share. “Have you ever seen a more gorgeous thing? What do we do with it? Should we slice it or should we just pass it back and forth?”

Skillful layers. Some graceful, some splay-yourself-on-the-floor, all disciplined and yet unfettered.

She glides back and forth between life, art, and story, reminding us that the story of our life is not our life. It is our story. 

She reminds us in no uncertain terms that this is her story. She reminds us – admonishingly at times – that there are certain elements of her life and her story that are not ours. Still, there’s more than enough ankle flashed.

The results hit that exact spot where you might want to look away, but you don’t look away.

Smith adopts various approaches, motifs, and versions of voice. The themes and the motifs and the characters and the aches and the moments all undulate, each churning up something new and something old. 

She is porous. She is impenetrable. It’s her story, yes, and in that weird meld between artist and art and audience, it’s ours, too.

When writing, we try not to slip on that patch that makes us look like that warning placard when people are mopping. We do this, we still write these slippery things where we get claps on the back and praised for bravery and then become conversation topics in chats and conversations and coffees. We risk slipping because of the need, the pull of the story, the fire that draws us into that, as Jeannine Ouellette might say. 

And Maggie Smith does it better than anyone, handling this slipperiness with ferocity and near-abandon, putting on shoes with deep, interlocked tread patterns rather than relying on taking tentative little steps. 

It’s honest. It’s messy. It’s often overwhelming.

It’s wonderful.