What I’m Reading:
Several weeks ago I wrote about one of Maggie Smith’s books of poems, Goldenrod. Shortly after I finished reading it, her debut memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, came out and I was gifted a copy by one of my clients.
I often read memoirs to see how people make sense of their lives when those lives look radically different from my own. Life is complex—so simultaneously beautiful and terrible—that I often wonder how anyone survives their stories, much less goes on to tell them and create meaning from them.
This time, however, I was struck by how similar her story is to my own. She’s a mother. A writer. A woman who divorced a husband who out-eared her and used that as leverage against her. A woman whose heart broke over unrealized dreams. A woman with fears about her children’s well-being.
She is also a woman who, in the process of rebuilding her world, finds herself.
As some of you know, I’ve been in the middle of writing my own memoir that touches on many of these same themes. There was a period of time when I was moving through chapters with ease; at that time, it felt like my story was just flowing out of me. Then something happened, I just stopped working on it.
In the last several months I haven’t made much progress on my book, and it was only in reading Smith’s book that I realized why (besides the logistical hurdles that I was blaming). I have been afraid to finish: I’m afraid to face my stories, afraid to share them widely, and afraid that what I have to say may hurt those around me (both those who are close to me, and those who were once close to me).
In her prologue, Smith names this fear for me when she says, “I’m trying to get to the truth, and I can’t get there except by looking at the whole, even the parts I don’t want to see. Maybe especially those parts.” And yet, she reminds me of why looking at these uncomfortable truths is worthwhile: “I’ve had to move into—and through—the darkness to find the beauty.”
What I’m Thinking About:
From the first page of Smith’s memoir, she makes it clear that any book she writes about her life would be incomplete. Of the book itself, she comments,
This isn’t a tell-all because “all” is something we can’t access. We don’t get “all.” “Some,” yes. “Most” if we’re lucky. “All,” no. There’s no such thing as a tell-all, only a tell-some—a tell-most, maybe. This is a tell-mine, and the mine keeps changing. Because I keep changing. The mine is slippery like that.”
A theme that continues to emerge throughout the book is the (im)possibility of truth-telling. The mine is slippery because truth is slippery. “I’d told the truth as I’d known it, but the truth had changed,” she comments. “This, of course, is the nature of truth.”
We are not omniscient narrators of our own life story—we don’t have a God’s eye view. We forget; we misremember; we creatively reconstruct. This is a central concern for Smith. She asks, “I know so little about the life I’ve called my own, if there are blank spaces I can’t fill in, can I still call it my life? Can I still claim it as mine?” As someone with a trauma history that has resulted in years of my childhood being a black box to me, I keenly feel this.
And yet, one of the most powerful things about this book, for me, is her insistence on telling the truth anyway, despite its shifty incompleteness. She declares, “I’m trying to tell you the truth. My truth. I’m trying to show you my hands, even when my hands are burning.” As I read that, I realized that my hands are also burning, and that it is for this reason that I’ve been reluctant to show them—to finish telling my truth, to finish my book, And yet, perhaps this is the very reason to do it.
What I’m Excited About:
I feel a bit reticent to say this as if I will jinx myself, but I’m excited to get back to my writing!
My son is going to school for the first time in two and a half months tomorrow, and I will have time to get back to my own projects, but more importantly, I have recovered (rediscovered? uncovered?) my desire to show my hands.
Booking & Availability:
I’ll be traveling a lot in the coming weeks! Here’s an updated schedule:
4/28-5/5: Pittsburgh, PA
5/6-5/7: Richmond, VA
5/8-5/11: OFF/VACAY
5/11-5/12: Richmond, VA
6/15-5/14: Pittsburgh, PA
5/15-5/18: Miami, FL
5/19/5/21: Cleveland, OH
5/22 on: Pittsburgh, PA
Make sure to check out my complete travel schedule on my website.
