The Iron Book Group will kick off 2025 with You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir from poet Maggie Smith.
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BOOK DESCRIPTION: Poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself. The book begins with one woman’s personal heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes.
With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is “extraordinary” (Ann Patchett) in the way that it reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new and beautiful.
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Copies of You Could Make This Place Beautiful can be picked up from the Book Discussion Shelf on our first floor, and it’s available digitally as an ebook (through Overdrive/Libby) and an audiobook (through Overdrive/Libby).
In-person discussions of You Could Make This Place Beautiful will be held at the library on Tuesday, January 14, at 7:00 PM, and Thursday, January 16, at 3:00 PM. Please attend whichever date you prefer, and no registration is required.
Published on December 19, 2024.
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