In the book she describes how, soon after her husband left the house he shared with her and their two children, she emailed him a draft of an essay she’d written about their breakup for the Times’s “Modern Love” column. She added: “I can’t make decisions in my life based on fear.” “I so respect and appreciate that question, and um, no, I did not feel the need to ask anyone for permission,” she said. “Did you have the impulse to ask anybody for permission,” one woman asked, “and were you concerned with how your ex-husband would feel?” Smith’s writing process, and one about her former husband, an unnamed lawyer who wafts unpleasantly through her book, both villain and cipher. (“I love your dress,” one question began.) There were several queries about Ms. Smith - wearing a black-and-white dress and a pair of pink heels - was appearing in conversation with the novelist Leslie Jamison, the audience Q. Smith became that most surprising of things, a celebrity poet.Īt the church, where Ms. (The first was “Keep Moving,” released in 2020.) Somehow between the publication of “Good Bones” and now, Ms. 3 position for hardcover nonfiction, is actually the second book Ms. “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” which just made its debut on The New York Times’s best-seller list in the No. Alert readers will recognize the title as a line from her viral 2016 poem “ Good Bones,” which became a social-media hit and then a wider cultural phenomenon, a “mantra of hope in hard times,” as Slate put it. Smith’s marriage - from her discovery of her husband’s affair to his decision to walk out - and how writing helped her survive it. The book, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” is about the collapse of Ms. The pews were crowded with admirers, many feverishly reading her new memoir even as they waited for her to speak.

The American poet and writer Maggie Smith exudes a beatific warmth, so it seemed apt - a felicitous pairing of author and venue - that her recent book tour included an evening at a Brooklyn church.

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