What is the author's perspective in the memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful?

Smith’s memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, is primarily written from the author’s first-person point of view. At the outset of the text, Smith tells her reader that the book “isn’t a tell-all. A tell-all would need an omniscient narrator—god-like, hovering over the whole scene seeing into the houses, listening to the conversations and phone calls, reading the texts and emails” (1). She utilizes this moment to establish her point of view throughout the memoir as she attempts to tell her version of the truth. While she divulges her personal experiences and thoughts, she does not attempt to create an authoritative account of her life.

Throughout the memoir, Smith includes passages from the third person lens in order to examine her life from an object point of view. In the passages entitled “The Play”, she poses her marriage as a staged performance in which her character is called The Wife. Through these fragments, Smith attempts to distance herself from the emotional turmoil of her own experience. She tells the reader, in “A Note on Conflict and Crisis”, “Funny how much easier it is to write my life in third person. To write she instead of I, hers instead of mine. Funny how much easier it is to write through the lens of plot and character and setting and inciting incident and conflict and crisis—to feel that sense of removal” (90).