67 pages • 2 hours read
You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir
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Pages 252-301Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 252-274 Summary
A Friend Says Every Book Begins with an Unanswerable Question
In this chapter, Smith asks “how to change” (252).
Some People Ask
When others ask Smith whether she will marry again, she does not tell them about her promise to her children that she will not add any other major changes to their lives in the near future, nor does she explain how she desires to find someone who loves her. Instead, she says that it is possible.
Punching Bag
Smith’s therapist challenges her to think more about setting boundaries. Smith responds that she thinks it is time to stop thinking about her connection to her husband as a relationship, because there is no reciprocity from him.
One Small Step
As her first step in setting boundaries, Smith sets up a new email account and asks her husband to use it. She only accesses the new email account on her laptop, so that she is not confronted with communication from him at all hours of the day and night.
Birds
A friend tells Smith that birding helped her get through her divorce. Smith considers how birds in trees are invisible to people but fill the air with song. She wonders whether she would see her life as rich and full of song if she could look at it now without thinking about what was missing.
Bees
When Smith and her husband were newly married, a hive of bees took up residence on the outside of a tree in their backyard. A Lowe’s delivery truck brought a grill and a lawnmower to their home. When Smith told the driver about the bees, he explained that he was a beekeeper and helped her to move the hive.
Smith learns that her husband and The Addressee discovered 50,000 bees in their wall.
When the Metaphor is Right There
Rhett is an early riser. Each morning, Smith puts on a nature documentary for him to watch while she prepares breakfast. Smith takes note of how all the animals present metaphors for her family’s experience. Male hyenas do not take an active role in parenting. When coral and jellyfish have a safe environment, they can live forever.
Above the Real
Smith updates her children’s school information and leaves her husband off the emergency contact list. She thinks about the unspoken contract between parents and children. She has promised to always be there for her children.
Outrage
Rhett struggles to sleep at night immediately after the divorce. When he is with one parent, he worries about the other. After Smith’s husband moves away, Rhett stops worrying about his father.
Smith hopes the reader will find her story useful.
This is What We Call a Full-Circle Moment
Smith’s marriage counselor sends an email three years later to say that she prescribes Smith’s book Keep Moving to her clients.
Caregiver
Caroline, an intuitive therapist, asks Smith to consider what her life would look like if she stopped approaching her adult relationships as the parent: “What would happen if you dialed your caregiving back from eighty percent to fifty percent? What if you came to your next relationship boundaried and whole?” (266). Smith decides it may be time to let go of her identity as the caregiver.
Forty Things
Smith’s mother reminds her that she and her husband were always enamored with one another. Smith’s husband even wrote a list of forty things he loves about her on her fortieth birthday. When she looks for the list, she realizes that it must not have been important enough to her to keep.
Smith still has old letters and postcards from her husband. She wonders why she keeps them.
The Things
Many of the items Smith has in her home were once shared items with her husband. She does not know what to do with all of them, including her wedding photos and cookbooks with her husband’s handwriting in them. She tries to strike a balance between replacing everything that clings to painful memories and maintaining consistency for her children.
Great White
Directly after the divorce, Smith’s therapy sessions are full of new information. During a slow week, Smith explains that it feels like the moments in Jaws when the shark disappears under water; the viewer knows it is not gone and will reappear at any moment.
The Intangibles
Aside from material objects, Smith is unsure what to do with her happy memories of times spent with her husband and elements of their shared life.
Pages 275-301 Summary
Joke
Smith can no longer cry and must buy prescription eyedrops.
It Wasn’t All Bad
Smith recalls a moment when her husband was supportive and helped her make a decision about the title of her book Good Bones.
Another Mother’s Day
Smith’s husband texts her on Mother’s Day to compliment her on her parenting. She does not respond but thinks about what she would like to say.
Some People Will Ask
Some people ask Smith whether she feels that writing this memoir is harmful to her children. Smith replies that she hopes it will give her children clarity and help them to forgive their parents for being human.
Years That Question
In response to a quotation from Zora Neal Hurston, Smith reflects on the fact that she has generated more questions than answers. A therapist tells her that if people want to change, they should wish for pain.
The Play
The Finder delivers a monologue, speaking to The Addressee of the postcard. She talks about how much she has learned and how much stronger and happier she is now.
Smith notes that the memoir is written in snippets because this is how she experienced her divorce.
The Scraps
Smith is a guest on the singer-songwriter Rhett Miller’s podcast, and he asks her to send him song ideas. She tells him that she would be interested in a song about the scraps that are left over from a life or relationship. He sends her the first few lyrics to a new song: “Maybe things get better in the aftermath / or maybe all you’re left with is the scraps” (285).
A Note on Form
A cento is a type of poem that is made from the pieces of other poems. Smith decides to write a cento, using pieces from the memoir.
A Kind of Cento, Collaged from Pieces of the Whole
Smith presents a freeform work of prose comprised of sentences and phrases from the rest of the memoir. In it, she wonders if she can still claim a life about which she knows very little. She discusses helping others and the way pain instructs people.
A Note on the Title
At first, Smith considers a darker title, something that fits the sadness and mourning she experiences. As she begins to see how beautiful her life is, even after and especially because of the divorce, she decides she wants her title to be a call to action.
Rhett learns that the tooth fairy and Easter bunny are not real. Smith wonders how much more magic must be broken after the divorce.
A Note on Plot
Unlike a narrative with a traditional plot, Smith’s story will continue even after the memoir closes its final chapter.
A Friend Says Every Book Begins with an Unanswerable Question
This chapter poses the question “how to make this place beautiful” (293).
Golden
Smith realizes that she has had many successful long-term relationships, including friends, parents, and family members.
Rainbow Connection
Violet makes a playlist for her mother with all the songs that mean something to them both. After watching The Muppet Movie together, Violet adds “Rainbow Connection” to the list.
It Gets Pretty Woo Here
Caroline claims that children choose their parents. Smith is not sure she agrees, but she believes she has hit the jackpot with her children and her own parents.
Updating and Unblurring
On what would have been her fourteenth wedding anniversary, Smith signs title papers to take possession of her home. The next time Google Maps takes a photo of her house, it will be entirely hers.
Full Disclosure
Smith is only able to buy her own home because of the success of Keep Moving.
Some People Will Ask
Smith responds to the question of whether she has forgiven her husband yet. She contemplates whether forgiveness is really necessary, particularly for someone who is not sorry. She states that, although she has not forgiven, she has accepted.
Magical Thinking
Rhett learns how to ride his bike and announces that it makes him feel independent. Smith revisits some of the scraps of notes she has written of things her children have said over the years. Once, when telling her to make a wish on a piece of dandelion fluff, he tells her that if someone else makes a wish on the same piece of fluff, only the second person’s wish comes true. Smith announces that if a person believes in wishes, then they should believe them to be infinite.
How It Ends
Smith revisits the question of whether she and her husband would still be married if she had never found the postcard. She decides that their marriage would still have ended in divorce.
Calling Myself Darling
Smith writes a poem called “Bride” and then visits the ocean.
Bride
In this poem, Smith looks back on her experience as a single woman, taking care of herself and offering love to herself.
Pages 252-301 Analysis
In You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Smith addresses readers directly, inviting them into her process of writing and making decisions about the structure and literary devices used in the memoir. Throughout the work, Smith draws attention to her thoughts about the book and her intentions as an author. She applies her repetitive technique of recurring chapter titles to distinguish her musings on the writing process from the rest of her story. “A Note on” begins a series of reflections on her decisions as she works through the structure of the piece, covering topics like setting, plot, motifs, character, title, and form.
In “A Note on Form,” Smith describes the poetic form known as the cento. A cento is comprised of pieces of other poems. She then offers her own version of a prose cento in the chapter “A Kind of Cento, Collaged from Pieces of the Whole.” The piece utilizes many of the repetitive elements in the collective work, including Smith’s repeated reference to magical thinking, further connecting her to the memoir The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
The first chapter titled “Magical Thinking” describes Rhett’s discovery that the Easter bunny and tooth fairy are not real. Rhett learns that his mother is the one who has been giving them gifts and bringing joy to holidays, and he is amazed. By letting go of magical thinking, Rhett sees his mother as a more complete person; he begins to see her for who she is. The same is true of Smith. Her experience with Divorce as Loss leaves her in a state of perpetual grief, and Didion defines the mourning period as one of deep magical thinking. When Smith moves away from magical thinking, she sees herself more clearly.
The final chapter titled “Magical Thinking” presents a series of snapshots from when Rhett and Violet were younger. In one memory, Rhett tells his mother that a piece of dandelion fluff will only grant the wish of the last person to wish upon it. She tells her son that if one believes in wishes, then one should believe in infinite wishes. Here, Smith is referencing her need to believe in the ability to change one’s life and find hope and joy, no matter what. Even though Rhett and Violet are getting older, she realizes that there are good things waiting for all three of them, even after some of the magic fades. The repetitive use of the chapter title helps the motif to evolve as Smith changes.
In this section, Smith’s journey of Divorce and Self-Discovery leads to a fuller consideration of the harms caused by Patriarchal Expectations in Contemporary Marriage. Throughout the memoir, Smith references “The Play,” in which her identity shifts from The Mother to The Wife to The Finder. Although she never leaves her identity as The Finder, it takes on new meaning. Rather than finding a postcard that indicates her husband’s infidelity, the name begins to reference Smith’s journey of self-discovery, which she describes as searching for herself with “lanterns.” In the poem “Bride,” Smith leaves behind the complications of contemporary patriarchal womanhood and the complications of a traditional partnership. She becomes her own wife, providing for her own needs, calling herself “Darling.”
Each motif, symbol, and theme weaves together like a quilt. Although it can be challenging to determine how the pieces fit together, Smith insists that it is up to readers to discover their own meaning in her story. All she has to offer are scraps of her experience, vignettes, what she refers to as “the material.” In her notes to the reader, she reminds her audience that form and content cannot be separated. She writes in snippets because her life feels as though it is made of scraps and shards. In those pieces, she finds beauty.
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