A Memoir of Growth and Pain – You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

This memoir by poet Maggie Smith relates the history of her marriage, her divorce, and journey to find some level of peace and acceptance. It is beautifully written, yet at times almost excruciatingly painful to read. She shares just enough of her life so that we have a sketch of the arc of the relationship from its beginning and onward as it unravels, the failed linchpin of that being when she discovers her husband's betrayal, and then its following and complete destruction. 

She writes eloquently of her loving relationship with her two young children, her closeness with her family, and with friends. Preoccupied with motherhood, and with her evolving success as a published writer, she does not recognize how the marriage is deconstructing until much later, when, as the divorce proceeds and is completed, she has the distance to realize how it was coming apart long before she discovered her husband's unfaithfulness.

Smith is respectful enough of her ex-husband in her portrayal, considering that he was the cheater, and once separated from Smith, moved 500 miles away from his young children, so that parenting became even more primarily her responsibility.

Even though I am agewise a peer of Smith's mother, I can recognize my younger self in past relationships that ended unhappily, though I suspect it doesn't matter how old one is in such situations. In those too, the signs were there for Smith as they were for me, though in the midst of things, they went unread. Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.", but that could easily be rephrased to happy marriages or relationships. Happy relationships are not often examined, it is the unhappy ones that plague us with doubt, disappointment, sadness, and anger.

Smith's mother tells her how unexpected the marriage's breakup was to her and the rest of Smith's family. She cites Smith's fortieth birthday, when Smith's husband presented her with a handwritten list of the 40 things he loved about her. Not only has that piece of paper disappeared, but Smith has no memory of it. Some reviewers have expressed disbelief about Smith's forgetting it and its loss, but I understand it – like so many poignant reminders of other times, in her pain she has destroyed it and excised the memory. She mentions in another passage how she now understands why people cut their past significant others out of photos or outright destroy them: of course you do, when the pain is greatest, you try to remove its source, and hold on only to the good pieces of memory.

I found this book by reading a post in "Oldster", a Substack edited by the journalist and editor Sari Botton, and when I went to the library to borrow it, I found it prominently displayed...perhaps a bit of the serendipity in life that Smith mentions in her writing. Who knows? Maggie Smith in "Oldster" 

Two Thirds of a Whole – Small World by Laura Zigman

I found this novel very moving: a story of two middle-aged sisters, both recently divorced, who also carry the pain of a sad childhood which they shared with another sister who was seriously disabled by cerebral palsy and died at just ten years old, along with their parents' divorce, and their father's decline into depression.

Joyce, the narrator and younger surviving sister, is an archivist who works on projects for a company that creates family histories from documents, photographs, videos, and other materials. Sometimes the family histories are to celebrate an event like a wedding, bar mitzvah, or anniversary, but sometimes there are other purposes involved. Since the divorce she lives alone in an apartment in Cambridge, MA where she works from the home office she has created in the second bedroom.

Lydia, the older sister, a graphic designer and fine artist, has been living in California for thirty years, but now that her marriage is over, she's decided to come home to New England. Joyce invites her to move in, at least temporarily, and take over the other bedroom.

The sisters work out a companionable, though not very communicative life together, and things seem smooth enough for a few months, until their quiet, never-there upstairs neighbor moves out and a couple moves in, bringing an array of belongings and unusual equipment. Then the noise and disruption begins...

Joyce participates in a neighborhood web group called Small World, but she also writes poems that are inspired both by what she sees posted there, along with her observations. She keeps this to herself. The poetry is an interesting and often very touching adjunct to the narrative flow of the book, and I found it very expressive as a way of understanding Joyce's character.

The sisters have a lot of secrets, about their shared childhood trauma, and about their present. Their communication difficulties are one of main drivers of the narrative, and it isn't until many of those are revealed, that there can be an examination of their bond and a resolution to their conflicts.

All in all, a very contemporary look at how childhood and family dynamics make us who we are, and how we view ourselves and those closest to us. Highly recommend.

As Loretta Said, "Snap Out Of It" – The Book That Matters Most, by Ann Hood

The Book That Matters Most was definitely not as interesting or satisfying for me as Hood's The Obituary Writer. Perhaps it was because I couldn't develop enough sympathy for Ava, the character at the center of this novel – somehow she didn't ring true for me.

Ava is heartbroken and distraught when her husband of twenty-five years leaves her for another woman, which is certainly understandable. Her grown children, a son and a wayward troubled daughter, Maggie, are living far away from Ava's comfortable home in Providence. Ava's mother is long dead and that loss is a wound that has never healed because Ava has not accepted it. In many ways, Ava has not gone forward and this is her true problem.

The novel weaves around Ava's difficulty in coping with her losses. She has an affair with a younger man she meets in the book club she joins to combat her loneliness. (The structure of the book club is for each member to choose "the book that matters most" to them, hence this novel's title.) Her daughter, who is living in Paris, has fallen into a drug-centered existence and is completely dependent on the older man who has turned her head, made her a kind of love-slave and feeds her addiction.

The reality is that Ava does lead something of a charmed life. She lives in a beautiful home in an elegant section of Providence, Rhode Island. She teaches French. Unlike other women in mid-life who are faced with her losses, she is not struggling financially or materially. She has loyal friendships.

Her problems have a very first-world setting and I want her to get on with things and fix her life. It takes an entire novel and a lot of improbable twists before she gets around to that, and then the conclusion, which finally ties everything up, seems forced. A little ambiguity might have been better and given the reader more food for thought.