Maggie Smith: Honesty, Integrity, and Endurance in the Messy Middle
Poet, and now memoirist, Maggie Smith has made the messy middle of her divorce into a stunning and captivating piece of art: You Could Make This Place Beautiful, her newest book. Maggie's marriage began its formal ending in 2018, and she has been processing the experience in so many ways, including some of my favorite writings on the topic. (I give her book "Keep Moving" to loads of new clients who are in the roughest starts of their journeys and her Modern Love column took my breath away in the earliest days of my own separation)
Listen as Maggie and I discuss marriage culture, wedding culture, small town culture, and why she is suspicious of the "before and after" transformation narrative. Maggie inspires the hell out of me when it comes to "the messy middle" of divorce, before there is a shiny new healed version of life, and also about just being radically, beautifully honest about... everything. This conversation just scratches the surface of what Maggie shares in her stunning book, so please get your hands on a copy of it. It's truly a gift and so are you, Maggie Smith!
New book:
The gorgeous poem, Good Bones, that took Maggie's work viral: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bones
Modern Love piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/style/modern-love-end-of-marriage-google-maps.html
