67 pages • 2 hours read
You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir
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Pages 140-197Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 140-169 Summary
Mother’s Day
Smith spends her first Mother’s Day without her husband. It is a surprisingly joyous day. Violet gives her a project she completed in class in which she says her mother has taught her to be optimistic. She and her children laugh and joke through dinner and then snuggle on the couch. She feels at peace.
About the Body
The divorce causes Smith to feel heavy, and she struggles to quiet her mind. She tries yoga, meditation, and other activities to find relief. A friend recommends running. Smith finds it difficult and frustrating, but she keeps pushing and surprises herself.
The Firsts
When Smith’s husband moves out, he does not take any of the things that Smith believes to be the most precious in their home: family photos, refrigerator drawings, baby teeth. These are the things she would run into a house fire to grab, but he had no interest in them. She realizes Rhett may lose his first baby tooth while he is at his father’s.
On Second Thought
Smith wonders how she can tell her story when she still feels she has not found it.
Ghost Story
A scene from the show Glitch causes Smith to cry for a character who dies and then returns to life after her husband has moved on.
Sure You Are
While teaching a graduate-level poetry workshop in Los Angeles, Smith tries to wean herself off Lexapro. She learns that her husband has taken their children to visit the woman he wrote the postcard to. When she calls him, he tells her she has no right to criticize his parenting while she is on a trip to LA. When she tells him she is working, he responds, “Sure you are” (150).
It Wasn’t All Bad
Her husband’s comment stands in contrast to the life-giving experience of the workshop. While on the trip, Smith finds community, friendship, and serenity.
A Note on Betrayal
Before the postcard, Smith’s husband asks her to stop traveling for work. She agrees, wanting to rescue her marriage, but her husband still treats her coldly. He tells her he knows it will not last.
Air Quotes
During a meeting, her husband’s lawyer uses air quotes when she refers to Smith’s work.
The Play
Smith examines the scene of the previous chapter as a play. Three lawyers and one poet, who has never been in a meeting like this before, sit together. The viewer cannot see what has led up to this meeting nor hear The Finder remind herself that her words are enough.
A Friend Says Every Book Begins with an Unanswerable Question
This chapter presents the question “how to remain myself” (157).
Empire Builder
Smith and her friend Wendy take a train ride across the country. Smith originally planned the trip as a post-divorce celebration, but litigation is dragging on. Smith’s bed is turned so that she sleeps facing the back of the train, so she watches as they leave places rather than as they arrive.
Gen X Forever & Ever, Amen
Smith starts listening to music from when she was younger. She realizes they are bands she liked before she met her husband.
The Vision Part of the Board
A friend recommends Smith make a vision board, but Smith struggles to come up with an image of her future.
Quarter Missing
Smith’s children stay overnight at their father’s house, and Smith divides her life in two: when she has children and when she does not. Her poetry, however, is hers alone.
Self-Portrait
Violet tells her mom that they drew self-portraits at school, and she struggled to make hers look like herself. Smith tells her that humans have difficulty seeing themselves.
The Profile
A friend texts Smith to tell her that her husband has a new profile on a dating app.
Ghost Story
Even though the children spend half their time at their father’s house, Smith still picks them up from school every day. When the children leave, she feels like a ghost haunting her home.
Signing the Papers
After one year of litigation, Smith signs the divorce papers. She visits a coffee shop afterward and wonders what she should do next. When she looks down, she sees a pen in her hand.
Pages 170-197 Summary
The Poem
Every poem feels like practice for The Poem that Smith is trying to write.
Lemonade
Each day of her divorce, Smith tweets a reminder to herself. She compiles these into a book. Someone remarks that she has made lemonade with her lemons, but Smith does not wish to justify her pain as the price of writing a book.
The Play
Any writer would compile this type of play into three parts: marriage, divorce, and whatever comes next. Smith reminds the reader that life does not have a perfect plot, and so the play continues.
Photo Essay that Won’t Happen
Smith still contemplates wearing her wedding dress and taking photos at various sites that were important during her marriage.
Joke
Rhett tries to tell Smith a joke, but she already knows the punchline is an elephant’s shadow. When he asks her how she knows, she internally wonders if it is because she has been carrying a heavy shadow of her own.
The Second Christmas
The second Christmas after the divorce, Smith’s husband has the children. Her neighbors bring her gifts to help her through, and Smith feels less alone.
A Note on Motifs
In the play Smith’s husband writes in college, the cheating spouse is exposed because she smells like his friend’s cologne. Smith is known for wearing perfume.
A Note on Setting
Smith’s divorce comes at the beginning of the pandemic, shutting her inside.
Quarantine Skate Club
Smith buys a pair of pink and aqua roller skates. She and her neighbor play music and skate together in the driveway. Soon Smith’s children join. Because she spent so many years separated from joy, she now actively seeks it out.
Email, Subject Line: Update
Smith’s husband sends a professional email informing her that he is engaged to The Addressee.
It’s Still There
Smith tries to say yes as much as she can to make up for all the times she heard and said no in her past. She meets someone new, and they take a trip to North Carolina together. For the first time, she swims in the ocean without fear. She tells the reader that beauty is always there, waiting to be found.
Some People Will Ask
When others want to know why she does not write more about her husband or the events in their life together, she argues that the story is not about him, nor is it a tell-all: “This is the story of a woman coming home to herself” (187).
What Now, Mom?
Because of the pandemic, Smith’s children attend school virtually from home. Smith converts the rooms in her house into a middle school and second-grade classroom. Smith sits with her son while he talks with his teacher and classmates on Zoom, and she overhears another student talking to her mother at home. When asked to draw a picture of his family, Rhett draws everyone but his father.
Because I Was a Beggar
An emotional alchemist helps Smith to release some negative energy she is carrying. Smith calls the practice “woo,” but she is desperate for relief.
A Note on Plot
Every incident has a catalyst before it, creating a trail that goes so far back that Smith cannot see where it begins.
Email, Subject Line: Update
Smith’s husband sends her an email telling her that he is relocating out of state and will be telling the kids today.
This is Where I Completely Freaked Out
Her husband’s email sends her into a panic. He has chosen to move five hundred miles away—not because of a job, but because he wanted to.
Bubbles
Their children move from one quarantine bubble at Smith’s home to another at their father’s. Three months after he sends the email, Smith’s husband moves out of state, popping one of the bubbles.
Pages 140-197 Analysis
Now that Smith’s divorce is final, she struggles to navigate her new present and future. When she discovered the postcard, she felt as though the greatest blow was the loss of certainty about the future. Her husband destroyed the mapped trajectory of their lives by casting doubt on the present. In this section of the memoir, a friend suggests Smith create a vision board, but she cannot see a future for herself, at least not yet.
Instead, she begins construction on her new identity, a form of work that develops a connection between Divorce and Self-Discovery. During her marriage, Smith placed her wants and needs last. When her husband was frustrated by her work travel, she began turning down opportunities, making her life smaller to accommodate him. Now she has the chance to make her life as big as she wants and to say yes as much as she wants. In doing so, she discovers joy. Her first Mother’s Day without her husband is full of laughter, fun, and love. She takes up skating with her children in a neighbor’s driveway. They play music and joke around. Smith starts listening to bands that she enjoyed before she met her husband.
In this section, Smith begins to move away from the identities that dominated the first part of her life. The play defines her according to her roles: The Wife, The Mother, The Finder. Although her identity does not yet have a new name, she no longer fits perfectly into a restrictive category. She begins to see that there may be more to her life than serving and being damaged by others.
Despite these moments of happiness, Smith is still processing Divorce as Loss and moving through stages of grief. Her son’s joke about the elephant reminds her of the shadow she carries with her, the depression left by the experience of mourning. The motif of the ghost reveals how Smith’s divorce has contributed to her feeling of invisibility. She repeatedly states that she is haunting her home. The divorce litigation drags on, even after the papers are signed, trapping Smith in a cycle of grief and continuously exposing her to belittlement. Her husband undermines her job, and his lawyer uses air quotes when referring to her work. Smith directly faces the disparity between how the work of women and men are perceived in patriarchal society. Despite her success, Smith recognizes that her children likely will grow up to see her husband’s work as more important than hers. As Smith starts to redefine her sense of self and ground herself in what brings her joy, others try to put her back into a box of concrete identity by diminishing her self-discovery and accomplishments.
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