In a move that is extremely on point, i want to talk about a review where the writer’s judgement of the book (that it’s not great) is not one that i particularly disagree with, but whose reasons for that judgement have been needling at me since i read the review just over a month ago.
In The Guardian on August 27, 2023, Rachel Cooke writes of Maggie Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful that “the cloyingly titled You Could Make This Place Beautiful is all the bad things at once: self-pitying, but also self-regarding; incontinent, but also horribly coy; trite and mawkish and bulging with what even its author acknowledges as ‘woo’.” Beyond its faux-profundity, Cooke observes that Smith’s prose style is “grindingly workaday.”
And i agree with all of that.
If Cooke had just stopped there, i’d have kind of nodded and thought no more of the review or the memoir. But, of course she doesn’t stop there. In the conclusion to her review (after needlessly swiping at the American reading public), she writes: “Personally, I could find among its pages no evidence that Smith did not love herself plenty already. Her husband, she suggests, left her in part because he was envious of the “fame” that came her way when one of her poems went viral. But this isn’t really my point. Self-optimisation – self-adoration – is the great disease of our age, a social pathology that makes a virtue of a certain kind of narcissism, and scapegoats of everyone else, and this, in the end, is why Smith’s book repulsed me. Its true moral is inadvertent. Every page serves as a reminder that it is far, far better to understand yourself than to love yourself.”
The charge in the conclusion isn’t that Smith’s writing is bad or that her memoir is boring. The charge is that she thinks too highly of herself, that she loves herself too much, that she’s insufficiently abject in her suffering. And that’s kind of a gross charge. What she cites as evidence for this is a statement Smith makes about why her husband left her (because of the fame brought on by the virality of her poems). This seems less a statement of sentiment than one of fact. Smith is famous. Her poems did go viral. And while we can never know why her husband chose to have an affair, it doesn’t seem an implausible conjecture that it was retaliation for her outshining him. To state it so baldly seems in bad taste to me, but the charge at issue isn’t (merely) bad taste. That case had already been made in the review, and, as i said, i’m sympathetic to it. Rather, the charge is of narcissism and immorality.
Cooke is, in that paragraph, accusing Smith of setting herself up as a false idol, and, by implication, she extends this accusation across a culture of, presumably, women, who just can’t shut up about how they are worth more than the way people have treated them.
The other thing that needles me about this review is the assumption that showing one’s suffering in detail is somehow required, that we owe to readers a fair measure of suffering in order to earn our books. This is a base assumption of memoir that i’d like to challenge — or at least, i’d propose that an absence of textual suffering isn’t necessarily evidence of suffering’s absence. I’m using lots of hedging language here because i’m speaking less as a critic and more as a writer, with my own work and fears about being on the receiving end of voyeuristic judgement in mind. For all that i don’t think You Could Make This Place Beautiful is a particularly good book, I think the choices Smith makes to avoid textually representing her abjection are deliberate ones.
Whether or not i’m right about Smith’s intent, my point stands that these choices have an effect that is not makes for a boring book. Rather, the choice to not depict herself at her most abject nudges the project of memoir away from the voyeuristic economy that insists on more and greater suffering, on seeing it in order to believe it. Smith’s choices to not dwell in the specificities of her suffering reminds me of Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, in the way both books draw attention to the way some sets of experiences (for Smith romantic abandonment, for Jamison recovery from alcoholism) share a shape, and this commonality becomes less obvious when we focus on the specifics of individual experience.
melanie brannagan frederiksen 