How to Make Betrayal Beautiful with Maggie Smith
May 16, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today we have the Maggie Smith. Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of its own Poison, Lamp of the Body and the national bestsellers Golden Rod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Maggie Smith, poet, how are you?
Maggie Smith:
I’m doing well. It’s good to see you.
Glennon Doyle:
Two. Have we ever spoken to each other face to face? Because I’ve read your work for so long that I feel like I know you, but this is our first time, huh?
Maggie Smith:
Same. Yeah, we’ve just been communicating via our books and the internet.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, yeah. So the Pod Squad should know this is an unusual day because I have requested from my team to have a conversation with Maggie by myself. And the reason for that, Maggie, is the minute I finished your new book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, I knew I just wanted an hour with you by myself because the book is so beautiful. It’s so honest and so deep and searing. And I personally related to every single page. The reason I wanted to talk to you alone is because I felt as I read your fierce commitment to truth, on your own behalf, and it felt like on lots of women’s behalf, and at the same time, this tension of equally fierce protection of your babies.
Glennon Doyle:
And that is why I felt such solidarity, whatever the word for protective without a patronizing vibe to it. And I DM’d you and said, “Okay, you did it.” You did the thing where you did both in writing, but then what happens is you have to go all over the place and talk about the writing with people who don’t feel the deep respect that you had for your family and the words who are cheapening the things. And so it’s a different beast talking about it than writing it. I just remember thinking, “Can you just read it? I already wrote it the best I could.”
Maggie Smith:
I know you know.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s hard and scary. And so I kept thinking, “Okay, I just want to sit with Maggie and let’s just talk about it and figure out how to talk about it together and practice answering in ways that don’t make us want to stick our forks in our eyes later.”
Maggie Smith:
Oh, bless you.
Glennon Doyle:
And is honoring, right, to the truth and the art and to our babies.
Maggie Smith:
I love this, I love this.
Glennon Doyle:
So let’s talk, Maggie. Set the stage for us. You’re a handful of years ago, you’ve got this precious little family in Ohio, two babies and a husband.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah, and a dog. Well, we won’t leave out the dog. The dog counts.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, the dog. You’re right, the dog, you had a dog. And your husband comes home from a work trip and you say, I think your words in the book are, “Things had shifted slightly.” And so what did you do? And also, what does it feel like in a home, because I knew exactly what you meant, when things just have shifted slightly, so you know something’s up in your bones?
Maggie Smith:
Yeah. I mean, I think if you’ve lived with someone for a number of years, you sense the weather change a little bit. It’s a low pressure system coming in. You sense the distance or lack of eye contact or I honestly, at this point, maybe mercifully don’t remember exactly what that felt like, but it definitely felt like something was just a little off for me.
Glennon Doyle:
So then what happens?
Maggie Smith:
So I snoop and I hate that. I wish that it had happened some other way so I could have told the truth and not been a snoop. But alas, when we write about our lives, we have to, I don’t know, be accountable and honest and open and brave. And so that means owning your stuff. And so I snooped and found something, without too many spoilers, that let me know that my marriage wasn’t exactly what I thought it was.
Glennon Doyle:
And I mean, we are going to have to tell them, Maggie, since this is a full interview, that it was betrayal, it was infidelity. We’re not going to give away most of it because wow, is there more. I had a very similar story. I found out that my husband had been unfaithful to me 10 years into our marriage and that it had gone on for a very long time, but was different than yours because it was sporadic, it was a bunch of different people. And yours was a relationship, which I’m sure has completely different vibes to it. You said, I loved this moment, you were talking about a scene in The Crown when the Queen goes into her husband’s bag and finds a picture of a woman, and you say, “She kind of stills herself and just puts it back. Because of her role, nothing could change.” And I remember feeling that way. I remember feeling like, “Oh my God, the cruelest thing about this is it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing I can do.”
Glennon Doyle:
And of course there was something I could do, but the babies were little, we had no money. I know this, but I can’t let myself know this because my role can’t change, nothing can change.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah. No, I totally get that. Finding a postcard addressed to someone out of state, which was all that I knew, but I knew something was up. I didn’t have a full picture and I still, full disclosure, do not have a full picture. But I knew what I found and I knew it wasn’t nothing. And so that, in some ways, started a chain reaction. The thing was rolling and there was no way to undo it because maybe your role can’t change, or maybe you think it can’t change, but you also can’t unsee.
Glennon Doyle:
I know.
Maggie Smith:
What you’ve seen or unknow what you know. So it’s going to have an impact regardless of what decision you make about what to do in that relationship, whether you bring it up, whether you don’t bring it up, whether you act like you don’t know, whether you act like you do know and don’t care, whether you force the person into therapy. No matter what happens, it’s never going to be the same. There’s a demarcation of before that knowledge and after that knowledge. And that is not to say that everything was peachy keen and perfect before that knowledge. It’s just to say that that felt like just a different shift because suddenly it wasn’t just us.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And it’s so infuriating because, well, for a couple of reasons. You said, God, I loved this, you said that, “When you lose your husband or your idea of it, it’s not just the loss of the husband or the relationship, it’s the loss of the knowledge of your future.” And you say everything goes from a period to just a bunch of ellipses, your future. Now, for a writer, all of your writing metaphors, it makes me so happy because I only understand things in compare it to a paragraph and I can get it. And I used to think of that, and Craig and I talk about this, so it’s fine, but I wasn’t deeply in love with my husband. We got married because it was the right thing to do, not because we were the right and we were great co-parents. And so there wasn’t a lot of passion there. When I found out about the infidelity, I wasn’t mad like a lover is mad, I was mad like a memoirist is mad, like, “You fucked up our plot.”
Maggie Smith:
The story, plot twist. This is not how I had mapped this out. I thought I was one character, but now you’ve written me into a new role that I did not sign up for.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, like finding out that you’re not the director of any of it and somebody else has taken away that power from you, which by the way, you never had.
Maggie Smith:
Right. I mean, the idea that the future was certain was a lie all along. I mean, the future was never certain, nothing was mapped out. No decision that you make, I mean, for me, in my twenties, no decision that you make in your twenties about starting a family with someone is promised to you frozen in amber for all of time. But of course, that hadn’t occurred to me just yet.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Maggie Smith:
In my mind, this was all completely permanent and irrevocable and this is not what happens and this is not what we’re going to do and this is not my story and I refuse it, like, “No, this is not happening.” But of course it was.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I always felt like, “You took our future, you took my future,” but that’s not what happened. We never had a future, it was just you took my idea of what the future was going to be.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah. It was always blank.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Maggie Smith:
There was nothing, there was nothing there. We were just projecting our own wishes and hopes. Here’s a writing metaphor. It’s almost like copy-paste. You have a good day with your partner and you think, “Well, I’m just going to copy-paste this into infinity. And the rest of time is going to be just like this.” Well, of course it’s not. People lose their jobs or get promoted or have kids or lose kids or meet other people or don’t meet other people or have to move or fall out of love. I mean, there is no copy-pasting, period. And so no, no one stole the future from me, they just made me realize I didn’t have much control, which as a firstborn daughter is not an easy thing to give up.
Glennon Doyle:
Same, firstborn daughter.
Maggie Smith:
Yep.
Glennon Doyle:
You start the book with the Emily Dickinson line, what is it? “I am out with lanterns looking for myself.”
Maggie Smith:
Go for it, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
“I’m out with a lantern looking for myself,” which really got me because I’m just always so confused about life, period. But specifically the idea that I’m supposed to be the detective and the mystery.
Maggie Smith:
That’s perfect.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m one of those cats that’s just chasing my tail. I’m almost there, I’m almost there. And every once in a while I kind of get it, but then my mystery self is just a step ahead all the time of my detective self. What did you mean when you chose that epigraph? “I’m out with the lantern looking for myself.”
Maggie Smith:
Well, I think I realized in writing Keep Moving, that was the book that I was trying to push forward through. That was me telling myself, “I can do it, I can do it, I can do it. Keep going.”
Glennon Doyle:
During the divorce.
Maggie Smith:
During all the divorce.
Glennon Doyle:
During all the trauma, right?
Maggie Smith:
Mm-hmm. And so this book was really more of a reckoning with the past and looking back and trying to think, “Where did I go?” And it really ended up being not about where did we go wrong or how did he do that or how did I allow this to happen? The big question, and I didn’t know that going in, the epigraph wasn’t the epigraph, the beginning of the book, but a portion of the way through writing this memoir, I realized the big central question is where did I go? And how do I get myself back, more importantly than that? If midlife crisis is one thing, what’s the opposite of crisis? Recovery, return. So how can I have a midlife recovery of self, a midlife return to self? Brought on by crisis, absolutely, but how can it also be an opportunity for me to figure out where did I get lost in this, not even just this relationship, this relationship, this family structure, this town, this job, this, the whole shebang?
Maggie Smith:
How many pieces of myself have I been sniping off and bargaining away? And how have I compartmentalized myself and stayed small in ways in order to accommodate other people? I know you get it.
Glennon Doyle:
Uh-huh. And I also very much get the midlife recovery of self. That’s what I’m in right now, that’s what I think I’ve been in since my infidelity revelations. I just read a recent poem of yours about embodiment, and that’s what I’m trying to figure out right now. And all of the imagery in the book about ghosts and it was a lot of references that made me think of Virginia Woolf’s Angel in the House to just appearing as a body in the world, is what we as women are trying to do in our forties is just stop being ghosts.
Maggie Smith:
Amen. Yes. Not being invisible anymore.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, yeah.
Maggie Smith:
We’re trying to fold ourselves up incredibly small to not get in anyone’s way.
Glennon Doyle:
One of the things you’ve returned to over and over in the book, which I completely agree with, is the betrayal is neat. With infidelity, it was very easy to just be like, “Well, he fucked it up.” You describe it as when there’s betrayal, there’s an explosion on one side of the street so it keeps anybody from having to look at the other side.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
So let’s go into some foreshadowing, because honestly, Maggie, in some ways, it was copy and pasting. The stuff in the beginning that was the problem turned out to be the problem in the end. Like, for example, I was sitting up, I don’t know, a little bit after the infidelity happened, and I had a memory of Craig telling me to my face that he did not want to get married. Maggie, sitting on my front porch, I was living with my friends and saying, “Nope, I do not want to marry you.” And I was like-
Maggie Smith:
You’re like “I wonder what he means.”
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. I was like, “But we can unpack that later, but now I have to order a dress. So if we could just end this conversation.” And wow, did we end up unpacking that later, Maggie?
Maggie Smith:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
You say you convinced him to marry you. He did not want to get married, it was not his path.
Maggie Smith:
Well, it took a while for us to get engaged after we moved in together. And I remember feeling kind of crotchety and impatient about it. But also, we started dating in our early twenties. Who should be getting married when they’re 22? No one. So actually, getting married at 28, even though it felt like on my watch it took a while, “took a while”, was actually appropriate. And now, I’m like, “Well, maybe thirties are a better time because you’re fully getting what you need out of life, you understand yourself and your needs a little bit better.” I mean, who knows? Our frontal lobes aren’t even fully developed when we’re 22. So I wouldn’t say that I pressured him into it, but he knew it was what I wanted. I always wanted to get married and have kids. And as a 22, 23-year-old guy, he was like, “Yeah, I don’t know.” And I think about that now. And on one hand, could you see that as a red flag? Maybe.
Maggie Smith:
But on the other hand, how many 22 or 23-year-old guys are super on board with the idea of marriage and kids with someone they’ve just started dating in the last year or so.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Maggie Smith:
Probably not many. And so that doesn’t seem at all odd to me. What’s maybe more a red flag is that I was in such a hurry. I can own that. And that’s the thing about betrayal being neat, is that it invites you not to look at your own stuff. It invites you not to think about the ways that you were not completely showing up for the other person, or it makes it really easy to finger-point. And I have no interest in doing that because I don’t think it’s true mostly. It might feel satisfying and maybe I might do it over a happy hour with a friend, but not in a book. So much of trying to get my whole self back through just the time of the last few years and in the writing of the book is also thinking a lot about having integrity about how I do that. I mean, integrity means wholeness, which I love. I’m such a word nerd. But so when we’re thinking about what does it mean to have personal integrity, it means showing up as your whole self.
Maggie Smith:
And newsflash, that means not being always cool or perfect or good or right. It’s probably going to mean sharing some things about you that you don’t love, if you’re showing up as your whole self, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And showing up as your whole self in a marriage is interesting. Explain to the Pod Squad why one of the repeated lines in your new book is you and he met at a creative writing workshop.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
This part feels so freaking important and a theme that my friends are repeating to me over and over again in different levels about what is happening in their marriage.
Maggie Smith:
Okay, so now I need to hear about that.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Well, okay. Now that they all met in creative workshops, writing workshops. Yeah. But you say that something about the most wonderful things that ever happened to you individually were the worst things that ever happened in your marriage. You say that there is a type of situation where a man in a marriage can be very progressive on the outside and say the right things and vote the right way and wear the right t-shirts. But when it comes down to what’s going on on the inside of the house, the deal, the unwritten deal is that the man’s work is real and important and that the mental load of the family will be carried by the woman. And when you said, Maggie, that you would be out working and when you called home to check on the kids, you would feel like you were getting in trouble. I felt that.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Talk to us about that vibe and why it was that the best things that ever happened to you individually were the worst things that happened to your marriage.
Maggie Smith:
Well, I think probably most people who are married or who have been married would say that the biggest stressors on their marriage are kids and their work. Those are the two things that take the most time, they also change your relationship with your partner. It is not the same when you have small kids and you’re just trying to get through bedtime, bathtime, who’s napping, who’s not napping, who picked up the acid reflux medication, who did this, who’s doing that? It becomes so transactional. You’re almost like coworkers in a project and the project is the children. And yet, I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I mean, I wanted to be a parent since I was a child myself, and they’re the loves of my life and I wouldn’t take it back. The other thing is my writing, it’s incredibly important to me. Those two things are the things that make me feel most realized as a human being; spending time with my kids and writing.
Maggie Smith:
And writing ended up being a pressure point in my marriage too, in large part because once my poem Good Bones went viral, I had opportunities to leave my house more often. And up until that point, I was working full-time in an office for a while, but for a while, I had been self-employed and I still am to this day. And so I was really home. If a kid couldn’t go to school, it was fine because I was working here and I could juggle to make sure that I could keep an eye on them and take them to the doctor. If somebody needed something, if someone had to go to a doctor’s appointment or the orthodontist or needed a volunteer to come to storytime or whatever, I was the one who was available because A, I worked in my house, and also my work didn’t pay as well and wasn’t frankly essential to our family. It was essential to me.
Glennon Doyle:
Which meant it was essential to your family because your children needed to know who you were fully. So it just wasn’t essential financially.
Maggie Smith:
No, that’s true. It wasn’t essential financially. And so it was more of an inconvenience when I had to be gone. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I was not here because the laundry doesn’t just float from the washer to the dryer and then float folded up into the children’s dressers.
Glennon Doyle:
It does, by the ghost in the house.
Maggie Smith:
The ghost in the house. It’s quite amazing how all of these things happen. And I don’t think that for people who work outside of the home, especially if they have a partner who works inside the home, there’s not necessarily a lot of cognition about how things run so smoothly. It’s not accidental that that happens. And so it became a problem, it became a problem. If I was invited to do a two-day visit at a university to give a reading, or three or four days at a conference, or every once in a while, a week teaching a workshop, it was a problem because I wasn’t here to do my other job. And there are so many things that you can do to maneuver to help take the load off of your partner when you leave the house, like setting up playdates and making sure that everything is done, done, done, and typing up things and making sure the Tylenol dosing is clear.
Maggie Smith:
And I know there are people listening to this who know exactly what that’s like.
Glennon Doyle:
Of course.
Maggie Smith:
To be trying to manage things from a distance or pre-manage them when you know have to be gone. But of course, when my then husband traveled, he didn’t have to do any of that prep for me. Not just because I was home, but because I knew all the stuff. That institutional knowledge lived in me and I had to somehow pass it all off whenever I left the house and it became a sore spot, I guess, is the best way to sum it up.
Glennon Doyle:
And Maggie, do you believe that that was it though? Because it feels to me that it was also about ego.
Maggie Smith:
Well, aren’t most things?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Because there’s the moment where you’re signing in a signing line, signing books, and one of your friends says, “I’m going to take a picture and send it to your husband.” And you say, “No, don’t, that will make everything worse.” So it wasn’t just that you were away.
Maggie Smith:
No, that’s true.
Glennon Doyle:
It was that you met in a creative writing workshop.
Maggie Smith:
Okay, fine. That’s fair, that’s fair. I accept that. Yeah, you know what? It’s double. I’ve thought about this. I’m a ruminator, I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve thought, “What if I was a pharmaceutical salesperson and I made a lot of money traveling? So it was actually really contributing to the family income and also it was true that I had to be gone a lot, but it had nothing to do with creative work and didn’t seem “fun or interesting” what I was doing. Would it have still been a sore spot?” The answer is yes, it still would’ve been a sore spot. I don’t think it would’ve been as sore of a spot. I think it was the perfect storm. And yet I’ll never know because it only happened the way that it happened. And part of what I’m really committed to is not projecting into other people. So I can only speak for myself and say, “Well, this is what happened and this is my experience.” But I don’t know what could have happened differently or what was going on inside everybody else’s thinking at that time.
Glennon Doyle:
And I think that’s a beautiful thing for the Pod Squad to hear because people are always asking me, “How do you write about other people? How do you write about people you love?” And with that, with that consciousness is how you do it, which is that you, for example, you say, “Every time good news would come about my writing, I would sense him cringe or I would sense him wince inwardly.” What you don’t say is he winced inwardly, you don’t take on a subjective voice on behalf of him. You are saying what you sensed because that sensing could be real, we all know it could be projected. You are very careful, I respect it so much from you, but that’s how you do it. You take your side of the street, you tell it as truthfully as possible, and you do it in a way that makes it clear that you don’t really know what the other person was experiencing but you do know what you were and you get to tell your story.
Maggie Smith:
You do, you do. You get to tell your story, and as long as you’re not ventriloquizing right through other people, I think that, for me, was one of the big boundaries. I can only talk for myself, I can only explain how things felt for me. That doesn’t mean it’s the objective truth, it just means that was my experience. And I mean, I say on the first page, this isn’t a tell-all because tell-alls don’t exist. It’s not that this isn’t a tell-all because those exist and this isn’t one, it’s that even a book that is marketed as a tell-all is, by nature, not that because we only have access to our own stuff, we can’t ever give. It’s not like a cubist painting where you’re going to see the face from four different angles at one time, we can only ever show our own perspective and what we’ve seen. And so while there are objective facts, there aren’t really objective truths.
Glennon Doyle:
No. PS.
Maggie Smith:
It’s tricky.
Glennon Doyle:
I mean, forget it if you think you can do that with other people, I can’t even do it myself. Maggie, I wrote an entire book about love and sex and figured out a year later I was queer. We can’t even really tell true stories about ourselves. We can only tell like, “This is what I can see right now.” And then it shifts and you’re like, “Oh my God, wait.” It’s like I can put on this perspective and tell you the story, but I can put on another one and tell you a whole nother story.
Maggie Smith:
100%. Someone asked me the other day, do you think this book would be different if you had waited 5 or 10 or 20 years to write the book?” I’m like, “Of course it’d be different, of course it would be different.” And the fact of memoir is, and what you just said illustrates this perfectly, the book ends and the life doesn’t, if we’re lucky. So what lives between two covers is a time capsule of your consciousness, your thinking, your cognition, your ability to process and metabolize that experience at the time. And then you send it to your editor and three weeks later you could have some middle of the night, sit bolt upright in bed revelation about something, or while you’re washing your hair, if you’re like me.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, in the shower.
Maggie Smith:
The shower. Amen to the shower. It’s where I do all my best thinking. It’s too bad we’re not doing this. We just like with frosted, everything blurred out in the shower would be such an intimate conversation.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a portal, it’s a portal.
Maggie Smith:
It’s a portal.
Glennon Doyle:
But it’s also, Maggie, just the only place where no one’s yelling at us. It’s the only place where we don’t have earphones in or children are asking for like…
Maggie Smith:
Oh, please, no, that’s not true. That is not true. Are you kidding me with this? I have kids coming in with the shower math homework while I’m in the shower. “Can you look at this long division?” I’m like, “No, I don’t understand it when I’m dry.”
Glennon Doyle:
Correct.
Maggie Smith:
“No, I don’t want to look at the long division in the shower. I’ll be out in a moment.”
Glennon Doyle:
So good.
Maggie Smith:
No, you’re right. It’s a complete time capsule and that’s okay.
Glennon Doyle:
It is.
Maggie Smith:
The gift is that we get to keep living and processing and expressing. And if we feel differently later, we can write that too.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Maggie Smith:
But we’re not done.
Glennon Doyle:
Because I think when people hear, “Life goes on after the book stops,” what they think is so more stuff happens to you and that is correct. But it doesn’t just mean that, life goes on doesn’t just mean more stuff happens, it means life goes on, more stuff happens so you understand the past differently.
Maggie Smith:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
You keep understanding your past differently, the more life goes on. Thank God you wrote this book now, and I hope you write it again in 10 years. But we need people to do it close to the truth because we don’t want 10-year perspective all the time because a lot of people are going through it right now. So we want to see ourselves in the nowness, the freshness of what just happened. We don’t always want 10-year wisdom perspective.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah. I think Kate Bowler said to me, “It’s the messy middle.” And I said, it 100% is the messy middle. And I understand this because it’s comforting. I think we have a preoccupation with before and after, which I actually am really interested in because I often prefer the before picture, whether it’s a kitchen or a hairstyle. I’m often, “Which one’s the improvement or why did you spend all that money to do that?” But I think we stories where first this happened and then, queue metaphor of chrysalis and butterfly emerging, and then I figured this out and I was completely transformed and I was a new, better person than it was all worth it, and we can wipe our hands of it and move on. And I think that’s not necessarily accurate would be the very euphemistic way I would say that. Most of us live in the messy middle for a really long time. And if there is transformation, it might not be one giant one, it might be lots of little incremental changes that you feel yourself recalibrating in your life and noticing things differently and making connections between things.
Maggie Smith:
And for me, writing a memoir was so deeply contextualizing because as someone who writes essays and poems, everything’s a one-off, like, oh, I write a poem and I’m just done with that poem. And then in three more days, or in three more months, I’ll write another poem. But really digging deep into a project like this and looking over years and years, and also looking at the different parts of my life, the mother parts and the partner parts, and the sister and daughter and writer parts, it was almost like cartography. I remember going to France for the first time and then coming home and being like, “I was that close to Spain?” Seeing a map later and finally realizing where I’d been because I didn’t really have a clear image when I was there of where I was in relation to other places.
Maggie Smith:
And so writing a memoir for me was like that, was getting to lay the whole thing out and see the echoes or idea rhymes, is how the poet me thinks of them, between different parts of my life. And it was not an easy writing process, it was painful at times, but what a gift to get to really contextualize some parts of your life.
Glennon Doyle:
I think I’ve been contextualizing, but honestly, Maggie, I don’t freaking know. I don’t know. Because truly, sometimes I think we are such desperate meaning makers. I remember handing Craig Love Warrior and him being like, “What is this? What am I about to read?” And I was like, “So I took the shit you gave me and I spun it into gold.” And that’s what women are always fucking doing. It’s like, “Here you go. We took the shit you gave us and we spun it into gold.” So the question is I never know if I’m writing my life or I’m living my writing.
Maggie Smith:
Ugh.
Glennon Doyle:
Right?
Maggie Smith:
And noting to take to my therapist right now.
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t know.
Maggie Smith:
Noting, yeah, noting to take to my therapist who’s always saying, “You’re intellectualizing, you’re intellectualizing. You need to get back into your body,” which takes us right back to where we began. I write a lot in this book about the idea of material, and what you just said, the idea of turning lemons into lemonade.
Glennon Doyle:
I love that part.
Maggie Smith:
And oh, thank goodness you’re a writer. So these things weren’t wasted on someone who wasn’t going to write about them or thank goodness this happened so that you could write a book about it. And at least you got a book out of it, someone said to my friend Kelly.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God.
Maggie Smith:
Writing about her abusive marriage, “Thank goodness you got a book out of it”? It’s like, “We’re writers, we would write about anything.” If none of this had happened, I would’ve written another book. I don’t need trauma or grand upheaval or disappointment or disillusionment as material, I can write about birds.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, you can.
Maggie Smith:
If I want to.
Glennon Doyle:
You can write about anything. It’s so interesting. It’s like, “Did it mean all that?” I’m so desperate, and it’s real and true. It’s a real need for redemption, need for meaning. But that’s why I haven’t written since Untamed because of the fact that the observed thing changes the thing. Do you know what I’m trying to say? That physics rule?
Maggie Smith:
I know completely.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Maggie Smith:
My daughter just said to me the other day, “When someone watches you do something, it changes what you’re doing because you know you’re being watched.”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, so your daughter said it. That’s what I meant.
Maggie Smith:
She’s 14, we totally know. Yes, if you are being watched, you behave differently. If you are crafting something for an audience, you are doing it differently. I agree with you. It makes me nervous and I don’t ever want to be feeling like I’m being performative or trying to put a positive spin on something that’s just hard. It’s okay for it to be hard.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Maggie Smith:
It’s okay for it to be ambiguous. It’s okay not to necessarily be the hero or heroine of every encounter or every narrative. It’s okay even to not be the good guy every time.
Glennon Doyle:
I know, I love that idea; the idea of putting away the need to be the good guy. If you still believe you have to be the good guy, you can’t write.
Maggie Smith:
No, you can’t.
Glennon Doyle:
Because it’s so obvious.
Maggie Smith:
You can’t. And honestly, a big part of being out with lanterns, looking for myself is really rethinking what it means to be good.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my god, Maggie. Me too.
Maggie Smith:
What does it mean to be good? Women are so self-sacrificing. So you’re feeling guilty about having a life outside of your kids, which your male spouse does not feel guilty having a life outside of the children because it’s not a cultural expectation that the bulk of their identity would be pulled from mothering. And so, yeah, oh my gosh, I’ve been thinking so much about this and the idea of phrases that are so… I mean, the whole thing is so gendered, it troubles me deeply, but the idea of getting too big for your britches, which I realize is a very Midwestern turn of phrase, I can’t help it, but just this idea of having to keep yourself small less anyone think that you’re trying to get too much out of life, which is no man has ever been too big for his britches.
Glennon Doyle:
No, it’s so amazing. You talk about just folding yourself up smaller and smaller, and this is in reference to your marriage, where there were ego things and you were trying to not, I don’t know, emasculate I guess. But the folding yourself up and I think you said you folded yourself up so small that you could fit yourself under your tongue and then you tried to bite your… I mean, just the staying small of all of it so as not to disturb anyone else’s ego.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah, you don’t want to take up too much space, you don’t want to upset people or make them feel bad or come across as demanding or as self-important. I mean, all of these things, a lot of it is I’m a Midwestern mom at my core, and so I’m supposed to be, what? What is the story? I’m supposed to be accommodating, self-sacrificing, available. I’m not supposed to want too much, I’m definitely not supposed to be too demanding, I’m not supposed to be angry, I’m not allowed to be sad, I need to be grateful.
Glennon Doyle:
You need to be a ghost.
Maggie Smith:
And I need to be a ghost.
Glennon Doyle:
You need to be not human. The good thing is so fascinating. Abby and I are talking about this nonstop because that’s another thing, that I’m always trying to figure out, “Am I a good person?” And I’m making all my decisions based on this idea of a good person? What would a good person do? What does that mean? Is there any such thing? And is anyone good and bad? I think not. And aren’t we just a big bunch of wants?
Maggie Smith:
I think we are a big bunch of wants.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re just a big bunch of parts of ourselves. The parts conversation helps me understand myself. There’s a part of me that wants this, there’s a part of me that wants this, as opposed to there’s one single self that is good or bad.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think there’s a lot more nuance that we are not opening ourselves up to. It’s not bad to want more in some aspects of your life. It’s also not bad if you’re satisfied with your life the way it is. And I think writing about this stuff has been challenging and talking about it has been more challenging, you’re right, because I heard someone yesterday say something like, “She just doesn’t seem angry enough.”
Glennon Doyle:
I have never heard that one, that’s what I haven’t gotten.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah. And I thought, “I can’t win.” Honestly, I can’t win.
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Maggie Smith:
Because if I were as angry as that person wanted me to be, I’d be way too angry for someone else.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Maggie Smith:
And that person who wants me to seek peace and acceptance and forgiveness and equilibrium would be completely turned off by just self-righteous fury. So I don’t even know what the measuring stick is for goodness, because it’s not the same for everyone, according to whom?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I think one of the reasons I’m so grateful for your work is that there is a shaming of women writers, artists, all women, that when we dare to tell any truth of our lives, it is shamed back to us in terms of, “Why are you airing your dirty laundry?” You mention that in your book, and I have heard that 49 million times. And my male counterparts who talk about their lives, talk about their families, they never, ever, ever hear it. But there is a strategic shaming of women who dare to tell the truth about their lives by saying you’re bad in a million different ways.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re bad for telling the truth and they’ll call you a bad mom, why would you say these things about your family? Or your kids will one day read it, whatever. But it’s what keeps us alone and lonely because we don’t read our lives. And anything true that happens to us is considered shameful and dirty. And so I’m so grateful that you are, in such a beautiful way, telling the truth because just have you gotten that yet?
Maggie Smith:
I haven’t.
Glennon Doyle:
The tell-all.
Maggie Smith:
Although I’m sure I will. So we’ll see. Well, is there anything more dangerous than a woman who will just tell it like it is? I don’t know. I mean, I think that’s a threatening thing. I asked myself the question over and over again in multiple contexts, “Who does silence serve? Who benefits from me keeping my mouth shut about this?” This could be something personal, it could be something political, it could be anything. Who does silence serve? The answer to that question almost always encourages me to run my mouth or pick up my pen because it’s not me. And honestly, it’s not my children.
Glennon Doyle:
Nope.
Maggie Smith:
My children are watching what I do and I’m modeling for them living a whole life with integrity and doing it with care. So who does it serve? Who benefits from women being quiet?
Glennon Doyle:
And the kids thing, it’s like the only people who talk about the truth done with grace and grit and respect hurting kids, don’t know shit about kids because family secrets are cyanide. Truth might be a little punch, it might be a little bit painful at first, but it is freeing. The secrets are the cyanide. Every child therapist knows that. That is what the underground things that are never said.
Maggie Smith:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
It is not the messy truth that is said that hurts them in the long run.
Maggie Smith:
Oh, 100%. I think secrets are so toxic. I think age-appropriate, in-time, real, gentle, honest conversations. Honesty is care. I think it’s caring for ourselves, I think it’s caring for the people in our lives. Kids are pretty intuitive, they don’t actually appreciate being gaslit.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Maggie Smith:
So we’ll see. I’ll touch base with you and let you know how that shapes up. It’s funny, I think, in part, I wrote some of those questions into the structure of the book as a form of like, “I’m going to go ahead and just head you off at the pass.”
Glennon Doyle:
I loved it.
Maggie Smith:
Because I know people are going to ask, “What about your kids?” I know people are going to ask, “Why air your dirty laundry? Or was it always like this or why this or why that?” So let’s just avoid having those conversations because it’s just in the book now. I can just say, “Read page 72 if someone asks.”
Glennon Doyle:
Please do, because they will, they will still ask.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah, they probably will, you’re right.
Glennon Doyle:
You did say when you were talking about the dirty laundry question, you did say, as only a poet could, “Who says it’s dirty anyway? It’s just lived in.” And I think for me, that gets at the core of it, which is I see all your shaming stuff, but what we’re always only talking about is life. I can promise my children one thing, which is the only things that have ever happened to us are life. The only things that we have done are things that humans are capable of.
Maggie Smith:
Yep. There it is, one category, there it is, life.
Glennon Doyle:
Just life and humans is what we have experienced and what we have been the whole way through. And the beautiful thing about you knowing all of our human things is that when you get to these human things in your life, you will not feel alone and ashamed because you will know that all the life that happens to you and all the humaning you do, and all the things that humans do to you are just human things and just life, they’re nothing to be ashamed of.
Maggie Smith:
Nothing to be ashamed of. Let’s not compound the difficulty by being ashamed.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Maggie Smith:
On top of everything else we’re feeling. It’s also just completely unnecessary. My hope for this book, honestly, is so small and it is just that someone will read it and say, “I feel seen.” It’s such a small thing, and maybe feels slightly less squishy or shameful about giving language to something that they’re needing to offload and process.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, that’s done.
Maggie Smith:
We’ll see.
Glennon Doyle:
Because that’s happened. That’s what already happened with me, Maggie.
Maggie Smith:
Oh, so I’m done.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re done. You can stop doing interviews.
Maggie Smith:
Success.
Glennon Doyle:
In this last five minutes, I want to talk to you about a thing I don’t understand and I’ve never understood, which is forgiveness. First, I don’t know what it is. I still don’t believe that anyone else knows what it is because I ask everybody and they just say words, words, words, but nobody’s ever able to tell me what it is.
Maggie Smith:
Oh, I was so hoping you wouldn’t ask me to define it, so don’t ask me to define it because I can’t.
Glennon Doyle:
I won’t, I won’t.
Maggie Smith:
Yeah, I started writing this book and I write pretty early on, “By the time I get to the last page of this book, I want to have forgiven.”
Glennon Doyle:
I love that.
Maggie Smith:
I really want to be in a place of forgiveness. That’s my goal for this book. This book is not a finger-pointing angry book, it’s a book about me trying to get back to wholeness and peace. That’s what I want. You can choose war or peace, I choose peace. And I’m not sure I got there, but I also realize, by the time I got to the end of the book, I don’t actually know that that was a reasonable or necessary goal. And so I got to something that is a little texturally different from forgiveness, and it’s something I call acceptance, which is that happened, period.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, thank you.
Maggie Smith:
So that happened, period. Yes, humans did things. All of it was life. It happened, I learned from it. I would’ve learned from anything that would’ve happened in those years. I didn’t need it.
Glennon Doyle:
Nope.
Maggie Smith:
I didn’t need it to learn. But everything is an offering, everything is a teacher, if you let it be, if you keep your antenna up. And so I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to gain something from it because I think I deserve at least that.
Glennon Doyle:
Amen. It happened.
Maggie Smith:
It happened.
Glennon Doyle:
Period. Moving on, moving along. Thank you for that. We’ll end with this. I loved so much when you were talking about feeling a bit of a cringe or uncomfortable feeling with, I think it was your parents, somebody’s parents were celebrating some long anniversary.
Maggie Smith:
My parents.
Glennon Doyle:
Your parents.
Maggie Smith:
Are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary next month, so it was I think their 48th when I was writing the book.
Glennon Doyle:
48. And there’s this beautiful thing that, Pod Squad, I want you to listen to, I think the part is called Golden and about the loss of that long relationship and all that that stands for in our world. And that’s a beautiful accomplishment. But Maggie talks about also, she says, “When my sisters turn 48, I will have had 48 years with them. When my children turn 48, I will have had 48 years of being their mother.” And she goes on and talks about the other long-term relationships she has in her life and she says, “That’s as golden as it gets.” Maggie, it’s just so beautiful. Why do we only celebrate the longevity of romantic relationships when these other relationships are what have carried us?
Maggie Smith:
Oh, my gosh. Honestly, the most fortifying, healing relationships of my life I realize have been both my relationship with my kids and particularly my female friends.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Maggie Smith:
I don’t know why we aren’t leaning more into that. Talk about being a lifeline.
Glennon Doyle:
I wrote something to somebody, I think I get weird after I get excited about an idea so I wrote that my sister and I were going to be having some golden anniversary coming up. I was like, “I am embracing the shit out of that.” And Maggie, so much of what you give us is just a whole new, fresh, deeper way of looking at our own lives and it’s glorious, your book is glorious. I love it. And it’s going to make a lot of people feel seen. And thank you for telling the truth so that we can just remember that we’re humans having a life.
Maggie Smith:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Love you. Love you too, Pod Squad. See you next time.
Glennon Doyle:
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