Maggie Smith: Reconceiving Our Lives
Maggie Smith is an incredible poet and teacher whose mastery of language is always stunning: She distills sentiments of motherhood, grief, and survival in a way that is equal parts relatable and beautiful. While she’s published poems that touch such a collective nerve they’ve gone viral—namely Good Bones—her newest offering is a memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. And in it, she not only breaks the traditional memoir format, but she also breaks open her relationship and the way we reimagine ourselves and our experiences as time passes. It is a beautiful book. Today, we discuss the ways that Maggie's memoir explores the disparity among gender roles and the collective damage caused by the patriarchy. Ultimately, through her story, she encourages us all to commit to a practice of self-love, introspection, and forgiveness. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM MAGGIE SMITH:
You Could Make This Place Beautiful
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Maggie’s Substack Newsletter
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TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: I'm very excited to talk about your beautiful book. How's it going?
MAGGIE SMITH: So far so good. Yeah. It's, you know, a lot different from publishing a book of poems, but so far so good.
ELISE: But probably in an interesting way, right?
MAGGIE: I think so, yeah. I mean, you know, the questions are in some ways like really different and in some ways actually really similar.
ELISE: You're probably accessing different outlets and different opportunities, I would imagine.
MAGGIE: Yeah, in some ways, yes. I mean, you know, obviously the readership is a little different for memoir than for poems. Like we tend to have a pretty small discerning readership, we poets, and so obviously there are more people who read memoir willingly, than poetry. I'm gonna try to woo them over to the poetry side, though. All of these memoir readers.
ELISE: Well, I mean, that's a good place to start because I feel like yes, you're a poet and yes, this is a memoir, but to me it's both and neither. You broke the format.
MAGGIE: Yeah, I went and broke it.
ELISE: You broke it and reconstituted it.
MAGGIE: Or I fixed it for myself, it's like someone hands you something that doesn't fit. You're like, well, I cannot put this on, or I can, you know, alter it so that it works for me. And so yeah, I guess I did sort of break it, or I modified it.
ELISE: So what was the impetus for doing it? Just an itch or an ache, or were you provoked?
MAGGIE: Oh, I mean, life is provoking, I suppose, experience is provoking, but no, I mean, really when I sit down to write anything, I'm always thinking, expecting, and probably hoping that it will just agree to be a poem. And this would not, you know, I mean, some things it's like the container will not work. And I write small poems, too. So it's not just that poetry isn't inadequate as a form for storytelling. It is not. There are plenty of poets who write terrific narrative poems, sometimes very long narrative poems. I suppose I could have made this some sort of epic, you know, book and verse, but that's just not how it came to me, I really needed to be able to talk to the reader. That's really the voice I had in my head, it was a conversational voice, which is not quite my poetry voice.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, I think it's a great public service. I felt this way about Minor Feelings too, and Kathy, that for people who are intimidated by poetry and I count myself in that, I don't know why, but I'm always concerned that I'm missing the salient point or the bigger point. I feel like it's a great way to backdoor us in and reminding us that we can live here too.
MAGGIE: I love that. It's all part of my ruse.
ELISE: Yes. Exactly. There are poems in the memoir as well that are stunning and obviously the title comes from a viral poem. I mean, how many people can say that they had a viral poem.
MAGGIE: A few. Yes. A few. It is a strange thing. It does sound sort of infected, doesn't it? Like it sounds problematic
ELISE: They need a new word for that.
MAGGIE: I know.
ELISE: What a resonant poem. We'll just say that.
MAGGIE: I like that. Thank you.
ELISE: Let's start at the beginning, and first of all, that line, I'm out with a lantern looking for myself, which I probably just butchered, is that Dickinson?
MAGGIE: Yeah. “I'm out with lanterns, looking for myself.”
ELISE: What a beautiful way to start.
MAGGIE: Oh, well, it's also problematic because once you let Emily Dickinson have the first words, it's hard to live up to it. You've just set the bar awfully high on page one, you know, on the epigraph page.
ELISE: It's a beautiful vision to set and I think it’s the right epigraph because it feels like as you are moving throughout the book and there are recurring questions that you come back to and answer in an evolving way, the book itself again, defies categorization and anyone who's listening who hasn't read it yet, it's slight and heavy and pieced apart and yet complete, but it's a very different reading experience. Like, people I think will be like, oh, I can do this. I can do this. And then sit with it.
MAGGIE: Yeah. I love that. I mean, I think it was a different writing experience. It made sense to me that it's a different reading experience and I, you know, I approached it as a poet because I don't know how to do it any other way. Like I really do enter every writing project as a poet. I probably email as a poet. Sitting down to try to tell a larger story and give backstory and context and, you know, contextualize different parts of my life. You know, I knew I wouldn't be able to do it in poems properly, but I knew I wanted to do it poetically because that's who I am as a writer. And I didn't want to try to write this book as someone else. I had to come to it as myself. And so I'm a whittler, like that's how I work. I write small, so the only way I can write long, effectively as myself is to write small, many times.
ELISE: Yeah, it's beautiful. And so when you pick up the book, some pages have a paragraph, some pages are linked together into little vignettes and stories, but it’s the pacing of it is highly unusual and fun. And it's this, throughout the book, you come back to this idea of yourself or all of us as nesting dolls and revisiting these earlier iterations of ourselves and our marriages, right? Because the book is ultimately about not even the disillusion of your marriage. It’s about the end of your marriage, right? There's no processing. It's just over, except the post-processing. Is that accurate?
MAGGIE: Yeah, and the post-post-processing. I mean, that's also the funny thing about memoirs. Like the book ends and the life continues, I mean that's the trick of it. But yeah, I guess I would say the crisis that created the spark of the book was my marriage ending. And in some ways the book isthe story of the opposite of a midlife crisis because I was thinking about the idea of crisis, you know, like, what is that? It's emergency, it's like some bad thing happening. And for me, in the epigraph that Emily Dickinson epigraph, I'm out with lanterns looking for myself. The book for me is really about coming home to myself and unfortunately, what spurred that thinking and processing and kind of what spurred that was a crisis. It was the end of my marriage, but it put me into the opposite of crisis, which is repair, recovery, return. Thank goodness.
I mean, if only we could get to those places without the crisis. If we could just skip over the crisis parts and get to the place where we kind of figure ourselves out in midlife. But for me that was the necessary upheaval that gave me the opportunity really through writing this book to kind of figure out, okay, how did I, you know, to quote David Byrne, how did I get here?
ELISE: Yeah. One theme, and maybe I was just paying attention to it, but I feel like it's a word that you come back to again and again and redefine and reimagine, is this idea of betrayal. And I'm gonna read to you a short section from your book. I hope you don't mind, you write, “here's the thing, betrayal is, It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the way you didn't show up for your partner, the harm you might have done. Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened, if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely, it's as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match. Sometimes I wonder if there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have survived? I don't know. That's the truth.”
It's so beautiful because one of the definitions of betrayal is revealing what is hidden, I wanna say. But it's this revelation of, I think often things we already know, right? But we just choose not see. It's inconvenient to know or see or go there, and so that idea of not, I wouldn't even say it's that we're complicit in our own betrayal, but sometimes we are, right?
MAGGIE: I mean, I suppose we can be and the way that I was thinking about it as I wrote that was really about just having a lot of personal accountability in my own life.
ELISE: Mm-hmm.
MAGGIE: And so not ever being able to sort of neatly say or finger point things didn't work because this happened, or things didn't work because this person behaved this way or things didn't work because this person made this decision. But to really look at the way that all marriages, partnerships, family systems, mother-daughter relationships, working relationships, crazy chaotic friend group texts, frankly, you know, they're co-created systems. Nothing is handed to us. So if any relationship goes off the rails, is it easy if there is some sense of betrayal or dishonesty or something big, you know, that happens to be like, well, that's why? And then to kind of, you know, wipe your hands of it and be absolved by that and not actually take time to reflect and think, okay, but also this is true. Also this other thing is true, and also I'm not a perfect person. And also there are a lot of things that probably led up to even that happening.
ELISE: Mm-hmm.
MAGGIE: I can only speak for myself and I can only take responsibility for my own actions. And so I'm not someone who really wants to blame myself for things that have happened in my life. But I do wanna take responsibility when, when I need to. We need more of that. I mean, I feel like the world is full of people who don't wanna be accountable. I don't wanna be one of those people.
ELISE: Yeah. I agree and you know, my book, which comes out a bit after yours, but it's in conversation with your book in a lot of places in interesting ways, it's about the seven deadly sins and women, and one of the sins is anger and the sublimation of our anger. Anger that's righteous and needs stating and boundary asserting, but the way that we repress it in order to retain relational equanimity really, or status or calm, and then again, how easy it is to find something, someone, some situation in which to place that anger because it's so uncomfortable to own it and process it ourselves.
And then what's lost when we don't because it's full of information, really good information, and your rage in the aftermath for good reason that you felt towards your husband for moving away, but then internally, that internal rage as you're processing what I think will feel very familiar to a lot of women where “the invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house” to quote you that you, in a dual career home, this idea that teaching and writing poetry should always be sublimated to the needs of the house and your children, whereas there was no expectation that your husband. Right? Can we talk about that a little bit about that? Because I understand it, I think many women understand it, that just sort of seething frustration that like, of course you're the one who shouldn't be at a conference.
MAGGIE: Yeah. I mean, I think in a lot of relationships, particularly when there are children involved, there is one person who we think of as the primary caregiver. And in marriage it's usually the mother and in a lot of those relationships, the primary breadwinner, not in all cases, but often, I mean, I'm still earning 77 cents on the dollar, so the odds are, it wouldn't be me. So not being the primary breadwinner. And so what kind of power imbalances happen in homes where one person out earns the other and there are children who need time scheduling, who have sick days, who, you know, have a lot of looking after. And so who naturally would be the sort of default person to do all of that work? Now that said, the, the sort of other issue is like, how do we value creative work? You know, culturally is, how do we value painting or photography or dance or writing as opposed to how we value banking or insurance sales or pharmaceuticals or law or medicine.
And some of that does have to do, I think, with a financial piece of it, but I think there's something else to it. Whereas if your job seems too pleasurable, it is treated like hobby and so I think I kind of ran into both of those issues where I was a primary caregiver in a two worker home, and my job seemed like a lot more fun and a lot less quote unquote work, so I know that's something that a lot of people will relate to when they read this book. Like whether they're still married, divorced on their second marriage, not married at all, just I think that even if they're not partnered at all, they might be like, oh, that, that reminds me of my parents or my neighbors, or my sister and brother-in-law. I think that dynamic is something that we have not outgrown in the 21st century.
ELISE: No, but I would say it's, it's buried deep in our psyches and it's a cultural constraint as well, because, and even though I'm married to like a lovely guy, who's an a really good father. I'm out earning him and yet often, and this is internalized in me and it's in, but it's in the culture. You know, the school asks me to volunteer. They don't ask him. There's an expectation of me as a mother that's very different, and whereas he gets accolades for doing half of the drop offs. No one is giving me props. And so it's beyond any household. It's not something that we can just re-engineer through wages. And I think you're right about sort of the cultural appeal of creative work and how it's like that can't be work, it seems too fun for sure, but it's also, as you know, brutal at times. Wonderful and brutal. But I think it gets to this other deep point that you speak to, and I just heard Gloria Steinem talking to the about this as well in the context of her own mother of this cultural idea that being a mother is the end all be all, and that there's front that you're delivering to your children when you suggest that that's not enough as an identity because it's not, and no child actually wants it to be, I really don't think that. I really don't think that they want that either.
MAGGIE: No, they don't. It's freeing because also then what does that mean? What does that mean if you are a daughter and you don't think that you want to have children, what does that tell you about your worth and possibility as an adult if you are not interested in replicating your family system? I think it's disastrous for women, but also I think about what I'm modeling also for my son and what he will later expect from a partner. So these are conversations we need to have loud and often I think, like loud and often.
ELISE: Yeah and you right “I'm dog airing a realization in my mind now, I don't think fathers are asking themselves these questions. Fathers don't feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home. I'm starring and underlining this fact for future reference.”
MAGGIE: With Sharpie. Yeah, it's true. It's like, you don't get a pat on the back for baking all of the class Valentine's Day treats, but probably if you were the father, there might be a look of surprise and oh, you also change diapers. You also push a stroller. You also do orthodontist appointments?I'm very used to being the go-to for all of those things. But again, accountability. I took on all of those things willingly. No one said, here's the contract and you will be handling all doctor's appointments, all baking of treats, all packed lunches, I mean, that was not the way that it was, but that's what I witnessed in my home.
I witnessed a father who handled car repairs, snow removal, you know, mowing the lawn, the occasional meal, it was usually tacos or something on the grill, you know, teaching us to drive. But most of what I would consider the real caretaking, not of the house and objects, but of the people inside it, the meals, the laundry, the dishes, the volunteering, the homework help. That was all my mom. And so that was something I, you know, in processing my own marriage and end of it, I had to sit with that and also be accountable for all the stuff I carried in and took on myself willingly without having anyone browbeat me into doing it.
ELISE: Yeah. And it's hard. This is hard, hard work to push against this. I mean, my husband and I were talking and laughing, but his mom had come to visit and every time she comes, she's always like, he's giving them a bath. Like his dad never gave him a bath. And I'm like, no trophies. No trophies. I love you. No trophies. And invariably he'll make, he makes really good spaghetti and meatballs. That's his thing. And he does it as you said, like once a month. And she'll just be sort of amazed and I'm like, stop, stop, stop, and my husband's very aware of it too, but I'm like this is part of why we're in this perpetual bind, that this is like such a celebratory moment, whereas this should just be what's expected, right?
MAGGIE: Yeah, there's a lot of undoing and untangling. I think that has to happen in like the family system and we're maybe untangling like a few threads every generation, but it's like a big knot. So, you know, I feel like we’re starting right to chip away at these things. We're starting to make some progress, but like, how long will it be and will it ever will get to a place where it's not asymmetrical? And my gut instinct is we will not, it’s so ingrained that I'm not sure we'll ever, you know, collectively get to a place where it is not asymmetrical. It'd be nice if the asymmetry were something closer to, you know, 60/40 instead of 80/20, and maybe that's progress enough, but I think awareness is a gift.
ELISE: It is a gift awareness, and just allowing it all into consciousness and I mean this is what my book is about is like what we police in ourselves and in each other, and how we are continually sustaining and maintaining these systems that we're not really conscious that we've bought into. So like the most of the parenting conversation we're having right now falls into sloth and this idea that women, we’re so driven in every sphere of our life to try to meet everyone's needs with not a lot of room for rest. And this idea of like anytime I pause, there's something else I should really be doing for my children, for my house.
MAGGIE: Oh, feel that we're also, I think, culturally celebrated for our burnout.
ELISE: Yes. And our busyness.
MAGGIE: Yeah, if the goal is quote unquote, like intensive parenting and that we can agree that most of that intensive parenting, that really hands-on parenting is happening asymmetrically because mothers are doing most of that. I know I'm not alone in sort of having the realization in midlife, like where did I go? You know, so many people my age or around my age are caretaking children, caretaking, perhaps spouses in one way, shape or form, whether we think of it that way or not, caretaking aging parents and also trying to manage our own professional and creative lives, it's so much. And then if we sit down and have a bag of chips and someone comes in, it's like the guilt.
ELISE: The guilt is real. But I think that, and maybe I'm more hopeful, maybe a smidge more hopeful than you, that I think that as we start to have these conversations and as women start to develop a common language or awareness around this and start talking about it and supporting each other in our agreement that this is not fair or not equitable, or not enough, I think we find somehow the stamina strength because I think a lot of what we've seen, and this is definitely getting better, but these wars, right between quote unquote stay-at-home moms, working moms where, which is a disservice on all sides and there's so much envy there and there's so much shame and meanwhile, everyone's, struggling. And I'm sure you would agree too, like some of these things, which are so essential really, parenting, it's not, it's not that complex. Maybe even though the world is so complex and kids are so complex, but we continue to meet complexity with more complexity.
I was having this conversation with a friend of mine who is a PhD in child development, and she's like, It's really very simple and you know, she's driven nuts by the complexity that we're creating socially around parenting.
MAGGIE: I mean, their, their needs are fairly, simple, if you think about it, like the basic needs. I agree, I mean, I guess I'm hopeful that the conversations will move things a bit. I will say I had, he will remain unnamed, a male acquaintance reach out to me who got an arc of the book instead of read an early copy. And he is a physician and he sent me an email and said, you know, basically I sat down and had a conversation with my wife about her dreams, her goals, the sort of like balance of who's doing what for our, you know, teenage kids in our house, how much I work, how this is all shaping out. And they came to some sort of like big realizations and some big adjustments and shifts going forward that they're going to try to implement. And he said, I don't know that we would've had that conversation if I hadn't read this book. And I will tell you, I did not imagine a male doctor reading this book and having a conversation with his wife about her, you know, quote, spreadsheet of tasks and how things might have shaped up differently. And so just in that, it does give me hope because women alone, we cannot be having these conversations.
ELISE: Absolutely not.
MAGGIE: It's not gonna work. Like if we can't get our partners on board with these conversations, we're just gonna be spinning our wheels and feeling probably really resentful, which is maybe the most toxic thing in a relationship ever, I think is resentment.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, going back to betrayal, which you come back to sort of again and again in the book, you know, betrayal is neat because it is absolving, and when we think about even these dynamics, right? And, there's this feeling of sometimes betrayal. It's a different type of betrayal, but that it's like, it's the men and the men are doing this to us, and I see this all over the place and it's understandable to be like, it's these guy, these guy patriarchal guys. I'm like, no, it's bigger than that. It's a bigger system. This isn't about blaming anyone's partner or husband or brother or father. This is about understanding the ways that culture programs us to abide by these rules.
But I agree. Men have to be engaged in these conversation and they have to recognize it in themselves and work to change and there's good things for them. I think we're, what we're seeing culturally is the way that patriarchy is destroying men as well.
MAGGIE: Absolutely. Yeah. They're victims of it too. I mean, I think that’s something really important to consider and I absolutely agree with you. I mean, it's funny, I would say, most of the men I know are really present parents, most of the men I know are really supportive partners. Most of the men I know are not, you know, drinking a martini and reading the paper at the end of the night while their partner dusts under their feet and, you know, lifts up their shoes to run the vacuum cleaner. I mean, that's not really a lot of what I'm seeing, but the system is still in place to congratulate that man for baking a class treat and not the the person who we expect, fully expect to be doing it.
And we're all carrying that. Like women are carrying that too. And that was sort of one of the tougher reckonings for me writing this book because one of the things that I think memoir in invites us or allows us to do, is sort of like make difficult connections pieces of our life, you know, past and present and sort of contextualize things in a new way. And part of that for me was really having to take a look at myself like nobody heals by blaming other people. That's not how we heal from things. I don't know what lesson I could possibly learn about my own life by blaming the actions of others. It just, it does not happen. Like the only way I'm going to be able to do better by myself is to look at myself and what choices I've made, what I could do differently, not in a sort of self-blaming way in a very, I think, self-compassionate way. Like how did I get here and now what?
ELISE: Yeah. This is where the nesting doll is.
MAGGIE: Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, I'm carrying so many little versions of myself nested inside this 46 year old human being, you know? And I like the idea of sort of carrying the earlier versions of yourself with you. I think there's a kind of tenderness suggested to that, maybe even a kind of maternal quality suggested in that, and that I'm not trying to erase earlier versions of myself, even the ones who maybe didn't make the best choices. You know, I'm not trying to disown them. I'm not trying to hide them away in some other space. Like I have all of them here with me, and I'm considering all of them as I make decisions in my life now.
ELISE: Yeah, and there's, there's something to that too where you talk about grief of the demise, the loss of your husband or the departure. The divorce, as a type of grief, which I think is very resonant for people, the loss of memory, right? Anyone who's had any sort of breakup can relate to this, where suddenly you don't have anyone to re-remember trips or moments or those moments become too painful to reprocess and it’s hard. And so, I mean, how do you think about that? Like the earlier years with your children and clearly there was a lot of love in that relationship. So how do you, how do you carry those nesting dolls?
MAGGIE: Therapy, honestly, I mean, you know, I'm being facetious a little, but you know, for people who have been in a long relationship and then it goes off the rails and ends, it’s a different kind of grief from say, widower grief, right? Where maybe the relationship gets to stay intact. And sort of time capsuled. And you get to maintain the quality and texture of those memories even as you're grieving the loss of the person in your present life and in your future. And I think something that happens in divorce that we maybe don't talk enough about is the kind of like, I think they call it ambiguous grief, right? It's like losing someone who's still around, but not really, and not still around and available to you in the capacity that they once were. And so if you've been with someone for a really long time, you have all this institutional knowledge, right? Like all these private jokes and little songs, and it's like, who did I see? Oh, I remember seeing that movie. Who did I see that with? Oh, right. And it's like walking in a minefield where chances are, if you've spent, you know, 15, 18, 20, 25, 30 years with a person, at least one out of five thoughts or memories you have. I'm just making that statistic up. I'm not a math person. Don't hold me to that. I'm a poet. No one needs me to do math, but I do think it's a high percentage if I really wrote down every thought I had, or every memory, or every song I heard, or anything like that. A fair amount are going to be connected to that relationship. And so I joked therapy, but honestly kind of dealing with that grief and with cognitive dissonance, right?
Like if this is true, how is that all true, too? And if that happy time was real, then how the hell did this happen? But if this is real and happened, then does it just like negate everything that came before or only to a certain point? Like do I get to keep any of it intact or does it just like clear burn all the way back to the very beginning? And I actually don't have a neat answer for that, which is why, you know, I'm still processing it and probably will be in some way, shape, or form for the rest of my life. Not that that's a fun project.
ELISE: Yeah. No, but I can imagine, and that's an important nuance. My brother's a widow and he was married to a man who was also my best friend, and so there's joy in going back into those memories and reprising those stories and like Peter is there. That's a point of connection, but I can imagine if those happy memories are now occupied by someone you are alienated from, you potentially dislike or even hate, like there's hotness, right? You're not like, let's go. I wanna go back to Italy with my ex and think about that amazing meal. You don't wanna be there.
MAGGIE: It's hard. And I think probably a lot of people have that, whether it's estrangement from a parent or you know, a divorce situation or even just that friend that you lost touch with and now it's too awkward to even reach back out. And so, all of those beautiful memories, they're dual now, right? Like they're not just happy. They also have this other shadow side to them. And so, yeah, and I also want for my children to be able to remember things positively that we did at one time. Remember positively, and be able to say, oh, remember the time we went to the beach and you found the fill in the blank, you know, oh, remember the time and not let the sort of present situation taint everything. You know, I'm really trying to do some recovery of memory and object and try to like lift some things at least up out the muck of it, you know, as much for their sake as for mine.
ELISE: Yeah. And I know it's not always possible, but yeah, finding some sort of path to, if not friendship, at least an equanimity so that it's not so stingy.
MAGGIE: Yeah.
ELISE: One thing I really appreciated and obviously I read a lot and I read a lot of memoirs and I love the category, but often I read some memoirs where it maybe didn't need to be so long.
MAGGIE: It was a meeting that could have been an email
ELISE: Potentially, I think some people have incredible stories and that in of itself obviously drives the book. And I think that your book, and even by virtue of just being such a different format, there's some memoir in my book, but it's not a memoir. It’s supporting my relationship to these sins or how they've shown up in my life, you call it the material, which I love, but you talk a lot about how are you making sort of disaster heap of your life in that moment useful, right, or, and I think you do an admirable job of actually cracking open different conversations like it hangs in a lot of closets, maybe that's a really weird metaphor, but you're opening doors all over the place with your quote unquote material in a way that I really appreciate, particularly in its succinctness. It's personal, but it's universal. You write: “the question I keep asking myself as I write this book, the questions I keep insisting upon is this: how can this story, this experience be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool you can use?” I love that. I mean, was that a driving question for you? Like what's the point of sharing this if it's not useful?
MAGGIE: I think that voice is the quiet, yet sometimes loud voice of my inner critic, which is the voice. The voice when writing, when we write about our lives in particular. And I think this may also be gendered, when women write about their lives, there's a little voice inside you, if you're lucky, it's a big voice if you're not, that says, who cares? Right. And the antidote to who cares is, well, maybe I can make it useful to someone else, in which case it's a value add. Right? And so there's something kind of double-sided about that part, which is, yes, I want this, I want this book to mean something to someone other than me. I don't want it to be self-indulgent. I want it to mean something to someone else. But the flip side of that is it doesn't actually need to unfold into a pocket knife for it to be useful. You don't actually need to use it to swat a fly though, you could if you needed to.You know, you could, you stack a few up. If you pre-ordered several copies and use it as a foot stool or a booster seat, you could, but it doesn't actually need to be that, because I don't give my poems jobs. You know, when I'm sitting down to write a poem, I'm not thinking poem, you better go out there and do some work in the world.
I'm just describing this tree, describing this feeling, trying. Like articulate the quality of light through the window at that particular moment and with poetry for some reason. That's always okay for me. I don't ever feel like I need to make a poem do or be anything for anybody other than me. And I think there's some little bit of like fear and, and maybe it's also part of the inner critic is also that sort of like inner imposter syndrome where for me, venturing into a new genre and perhaps reaching different readers and actually asking myself like, what right do I have? Who do I think I am? And on the other hand, if you are living your life so small that you never, ever ask yourself, who do I think I am? Maybe you're doing it wrong. Like living a little bigger is maybe not the worst thing for us.
ELISE: Oh, Maggie, it's so gendered. It's so funny. I mean, again, not to project myself into your book.
MAGGIE: Please do.
ELISE: Yeah. Because one of the sins, as I'm sure you know, is pride, and that chapter is all about this idea that women have not to be too big for our britches, the fear of being seen, fear of narcissism, fearing fear of appearing to be narcissistic at all. Again, that idea of who cares and how treacherous and dangerous it is to be a woman who's seen, we don't really like them culturally. Who does she think she is? How dare she? I just walked right into that trap in my over-identification. But also I hear you because you said, you know, the Swiss Army knife tool are hardworking and I very much felt that way and feel this way about my book, how can I make it have value and I need it to work as hard as it can and to be fun. And you know, I worked really hard to make it hardworking, ironically.
MAGGIE: Yeah, I love that like, now there’s self-reflection upon, like, why did I need to do that? Like, what was that impulse?
ELISE: Yeah. Well, and look I'm commending you for it, right? Like I recognize, no, but it's like, oh, so of course you recognize, yeah. I'm just falling right into that trope of thank you for writing such a hardworking memoir that attaches to so many other themes.
MAGGIE: But also I was like, oh, thank goodness someone saw that, because now I feel less afraid that no one will care. I mean, we're just human beings. I mean, that's the thing. We're just human beings and this is the air we breathe and the water we swim in. And honestly, if we weren't a little bit insecure, we'd be insufferable. So it's, it's fine.
ELISE: It is good, but it is a balance. I mean, this is what the book, you know, this is what I think we're all after, is this balance of recognizing these impulse, having these conversations where we're like, I recognize what's coming up in me, which is anxiety that someone's gonna pick up this book with a big F. Like, who cares? Or who do you think you are? Or why did you think that this should be published? And this armoring that we do instinctively around that.
MAGGIE: Oh yeah. I mean, even the questions in the book are like I am anticipating some reader's resistance or pressure points or pushback, and I'm just like, well, I'm just gonna nip that in the bud and I'm going to answer my own questions in the book, like I see where you're going and I will actually beat you there.
ELISE: I want you to read a poem for us, but before that let's talk about these questions. Let's just turn to your kids. Cause I thought this part was really salient and beautiful too around, I think the title of this was “some people ask, but you don't regret the marriage, right? Because otherwise you wouldn't have your children. People say this all the time. It's not even a question really. It's a statement. They want confirmation, they want reassurance. Maybe you're thinking it now, reading this book. At least she has her children or it was worth it for the children. And when people say this, I've paused for a moment. I'm thinking about the cost of answering fully.”
MAGGIE: Yeah. honestly the answer, I mean, you know, because you've read it, the answer changes. The answer early on in the writing of this book was, I would undo all of it. I would undo all of it, because of course if we rewind our lives back far enough before our marriage, before our children, we probably would be married to other people and have other children, and we wouldn't have, we wouldn't be missing the children we don't know exist.
You know, I mean, if I think about it if this is a multiverse, if I'm thinking about it, then the version of me right now perhaps was rewound from some other relationship. And there are children I have that I don't, that I never met. So the idea I would have, I think in my early grief and early, just like profound suffering, I wanted to feel better and I would have taken everything back in order to not have suffered and also not to have had my kids suffer in that way. I wanted to give us all a different outcome and the only way to do that was to undo everything and I, you know, spoiler alert a little later in the book, I come to a different feeling about it, which is no, actually I want these two kids. And I suppose that it is worth whatever had to happen to get these two incredible, particular human beings into my life, and for us to be a unit. But goodness, it's not easy to get there to that line of thinking.
ELISE: Yeah. No, it's not.
MAGGIE: I think when, whenever something befalls us, I mean it's the same thing when someone that you love dies and everyone says, well, aren't you so glad that you had that relationship for as long as you did? Or aren't you so glad that you were in each other's lives? And of course, the answer is always yes. The answer is never, no, I wish I'd never met this person because this hurts so much. You know? Or at least you wouldn't voice that, right? I mean, that's just not how we live and think. And so I think that just is a testament to how much of the writing process for me was also about the thinking and feeling process. And I land in the back third of the book in a different place from the first third of the book. And I felt that deeply reading it aloud when I recorded the audio book, the first third of the book was hard for me in a way that the last third of the book wasn't, and I can feel the energy and rebounding.
ELISE: Did you revise the book a lot or were you revising as you went? Or was the revision primarily with your editor or was it before you handed it in?
MAGGIE: So I actually had a friend of mine, Megan Steelstra, who's a terrific writer. I had Megan work with me on this book and I just reached out to her and said I'm doing this thing, I have like 50 thousand pieces, how do you feel about working on a collage project with me? That is actually a book. And so we worked together on the individual pieces, but primarily on the arc and the structuring and braiding of how it would be laid out. So one example of something she suggested is in the original draft, all of those questions, a friend says, every book begins with an unanswerable question. That was one chapter with a list of questions. And so Megan was like, actually I think it's gonna be more impactful if you let each of them, again, the white space, you let each of them have some breath and then they can kind of ping off of whatever text is immediately before them and ping again off of whatever text immediately follows. So you can kind of live with that question a little bit more fully without just rushing on to the next one, and so we would get together on Zoom. and kind of talk through, okay, so what's happening here? What do we need more of? What do we need less of? What needs to be clearer? How's the balance? It was a really organic process.
ELISE: Yeah. But the fact that you're a poet certainly comes through because the quality of each piece, going back to this works hard or like each, each piece really has a place, nothing feels arbitrary, throwaway, or not fully considered, it's a totally different format. I’ll be curious to see whether it doesn't inspire more people to do the same or to break format.
MAGGIE: I hope so.
ELISE: I really liked it as an experience and being able to read a lot and then stop and then read a little, and it was a different pace and it lands with a lot of weight.
MAGGIE: Well, thank you. Yeah. I hope it gives permission to some other people to maybe try to take some risks.
ELISE: Yes, will you read, and I don't know what page it's on, but will you read Bride?
MAGGIE: Oh sure.
[00:53:10] ELISE: I know, I know. You're probably asked to read it all the time.
MAGGIE: No, no. I mean, I joke that that Good Bones is my free bird, so Bride would be like, I don't know, what is Leonard Skynyrd second biggest hit? I feel like I should be able to recall that. I feel like this is the part of the radio show. If this were a radio show where we'd take callers, line one. What is Leonard Skinner's second largest radio hit? Like a quick Google search would certainly reveal. I'm like will that go in the show notes? We'll see. Oh my goodness.
“Bride”: How long have I been Wed to myself calling myself, darling, dressing for my own pleasure each morning, choosing perfume to turn me. How long have I been alone in this house, but not alone? Married less to the man than to the woman. Silvering with the mirror. I know the kind of wife I need and I become her. The one who will leave this earth at the same instant I do. I am my own bride lifting the veil to see my face, darling. I say. I have waited for you all my life.
ELISE: Hmm. Beautiful. Thank you, Maggie.
MAGGIE: Thank you.
ELISE: I'm so excited for the book to come into the world, and I feel like it's gonna be everywhere, so congratulations.
MAGGIE: Well, congratulations on yours, which now I can't wait to read. And I'm realizing all of these touch points and the ways that they're, they're in conversation.
ELISE: Yeah, my hope is that it's one of those books that people are say, wow, that is so obvious, and yet it was completely invisible.
MAGGIE: That's a good hope. I like this speaking it aloud to the universe. May you receive that.
ELISE: Thank you. Oh, but truly good luck. People are gonna love this book.
Coming back to this idea of nesting dolls, Maggie writes: “How I picture it: Our marriages are nesting dolls, too. We carry each iteration: the marriage we had before the children, the marriage of love letters and late nights at dive bars and train rides through France, the marriage we had after the children, the marriage of tenderness but transactional communication—who’s doing what, and when, and how—and early mornings and stroller walks and crayon on the walls and sunscreen that always needs to be reapplied; the marriage we had toward the end before we knew there was an end, the marriage of the silent treatment and couch sleeping and the occasional update email. Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves—our togeth-selves—to find it. I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.” I’ll see you next week.
