Poet Maggie Smith's search for self, understanding, and human connection

Poet Maggie Smith’s memoir "You Could Make This Place Beautiful" created a lot of buzz and made bestseller lists. Author Ann Patchett called it "extraordinary." And NPR's Mary Louise Kelly says it's "a triumph."

Smith will be at Seattle’s Hugo House on June 8 to read from and discuss her work. She spoke to KUOW’s Paige Browning ahead of her visit.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Paige Browning: You open your memoir with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson: “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” What does that mean to you?

Maggie Smith: Aren't we all? When I was writing it, I did not have that epigraph in mind immediately. I think I discovered it and reverse engineered part of the opening of the book to work with it about halfway through the writing of the book. But when I encountered that line, I thought, "Oh, that's what it is." And frankly, that's what poetry does for me.

It articulates something that I haven't quite been able to articulate for myself. So much of this book is really about an excavation of self, a reclaiming of self, a trying to figure out in the middle of my life with my marriage ending, "Okay, what's next? Who am I now? What choices do I get to make for myself? What bits of myself have I maybe lost along the way that I need to go back and pick up and pocket and start over with?" That image of a woman sort of holding a lantern, walking through life, figuring out the sort of next path, that really appealed to me.

The title of your book comes from the last line of your poem “Good Bones,” which went viral in 2016. Why did you use that line?

It’s kind of a directive. It's a directive to me for having to sort of start over and make a new life for myself at the end of my marriage. But also, I have an ulterior motive, which is that this poor poem, I call it a disaster barometer. Usually when people read it, or receive it, or see it on the internet, or a friend emails it, it's because something terrible has happened in the world. It goes viral again and again, every time there's a new school shooting, every time there's a terrorist attack.

Part of me was thinking, "Wouldn't it be nice if someone might discover this poem, or think about it in a new way, apart from tragedy, via this memoir?" And I actually have heard from people who have discovered the poem in this book and that makes me happy on the poem’s behalf.

A focal point of your book is the conflict between your role as a stay-at-home mom, and how your work as a writer was valued. I wonder how the end of your marriage helped resolve this conflict?

It's funny. It's sort of made it a moot point. I'm still doing all of the caregiving. I'm a single parent. So my roles are still doubled. I'm still doing the laundry, and packing the lunches, and driving to soccer. And I'm still traveling for book tours, and writing on deadline, and recording interviews. But I don't have to apologize for that. And I don't have to ask permission to do it. And so for me, it's not less work now, but it's less complicated.

What have you heard from readers about the book? And who do you think benefits from reading it?

I have gotten a lot of mail in my career as a writer, and I have never gotten a response to anything I've written that sort of measures up to what I'm hearing from readers about "You Could Make This Place Beautiful." Almost all of them begin the same way, which is, "This is the first time I've ever reached out to an author, but I had to tell you, this is so close to my experience," or, "This is not at all my experience, but it reminds me of something that happened to a friend."

I think part of what memoir does, I hope, and what it does for me when I'm reading about other people's lives, is it makes me feel less alone in my own particular human experience. Even if my experience doesn't align perfectly with that writer’s, there's something about the gift of being brave and vulnerable and sharing a story that makes me feel braver. That's really what I'm hearing from other people. It's like I feel seen and understood, and there's that sense of just beautiful commiseration that is so powerful.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.