SMITH: Well, I mean, we are a couple with two kids, and we both worked, although he worked out of the house and I worked inside the house and was the primary caregiver. Tell us a little bit about your husband and then what happened to your marriage after this poem went viral. PARKS: The memoir touches a lot on your work, but it really focuses on the end of your marriage. And so that poem widened my readership in a way I just - I couldn't have anticipated. But the poetry readership is generally sort of small and discerning. I'd been writing for years and years and had published a couple of books at that point. SMITH: As a, you know, middle-aged mom of two young kids in Central Ohio, it's hard to overstate how completely bewildering and wonderful and confusing and strange and thrilling that was. Talk me through what it was like when 'Good Bones' went viral.

PARKS: Thank you so much for being with us. She writes all about that, what happened before and after, in her new memoir, 'You Could Make This Place Beautiful.' And she joins us now. It electrified her writing career, and it changed her life in a multitude of other ways as well.

PARKS: That's Maggie Smith reading the first lines of her poem. The world is at least 50% terrible, and that's a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I've shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I'll keep from my children. MAGGIE SMITH: (Reading) Life is short, though I keep this from my children. In 2016, a poem titled 'Good Bones' went viral.

Good Bones by Maggie Smith