Smith’s memoir concerns the end of her marriage but its real subject is self-love
n 2018, Maggie Smith, a poet and essayist from Columbus, Ohio, discovered that her husband was having an affair. He had just got back from a business trip, and something felt off between them; a barely perceptible change of temperature. So she did that awful thing, and looked inside his messenger bag, its unbuckled flap irresistible once he was safely in bed. Naturally, she hoped to find nothing. But alas, nothing was not what she found.
Smith was devastated. But writers write, and in the years since this detonation, she has made full use of it, material-wise. In 2020, she published, a book inspired by the daily “notes to self” she shared on social media during her divorce. This was followed, in 2021, by, an invitation to “use the healing power of writing” to see change as “an opportunity for transformation”. And now here’s a third book: a memoir called.
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” . How terrifying to open a book, and find a long enumeration of all the cute things her children have said . How horrifying, to see a writer unashamedly listing all their positive attributes . Quotes from other writers – Joan Didion, Clive James – should alleviate the agony, but not even they can save her.
Look, abandonment is an agony like no other. To be a lover who is not loved back necessitates language that feels both infinitely renewable and utterly redundant, and it’s this that makes it territory for the writer: impossible, universal, the ineluctable quest. But Smith’s book has nothing to do with all this, and not only because her prose is so grindingly workaday .
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 –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.
Malaysia Latest News, Malaysia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith review – a trial and no errorsInspired by an extraordinary court case, and featuring a real-life Victorian novelist, Smith’s funny, almost flawless new novel examines identity, the notion of truth and 19th-century England and Jamaica in flux
Read more »
Reality TV star’s two-year-old daughter dies after cancer battle‘She left us not with a cry but with a big beautiful smile - frolicking fearlessly onto her next adventure.’
Read more »
Reality TV star’s two-year-old daughter dies after cancer battle‘She left us not with a cry but with a big beautiful smile - frolicking fearlessly onto her next adventure.’
Read more »
So, we’re all watching Suits again. Why?The legal comedy takes place in a parallel universe where HR does not exist.
Read more »
‘It was a beautiful death’: Legendary knee surgeon Merv Cross passes awayCross got generations of athletes back onto the park, including Dennis Lillee, Paul Kelly and Tom Carroll.
Read more »
‘It was a beautiful death’: Legendary knee surgeon Merv Cross passes awayCross got generations of athletes back onto the park, including Dennis Lillee, Paul Kelly and Tom Carroll.
Read more »