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Title details for All the Lives We Ever Lived by Katharine Smyth - Available

All the Lives We Ever Lived

Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf

by Katharine Smyth
Brittany Pressley
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A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own lives—and see clearly the people we love most.
“Transcendent.”—The Washington Post • “You’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.”—The Wall Street Journal
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TOWN & COUNTRY
Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death—a calamity that claimed her favorite person—she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief.
Smyth’s story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf’s Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss, and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel—and crafts an elegant reminder of literature’s ability to clarify and console.
 
Braiding memoir, literary criticism, and biography, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author.
Praise for All the Lives We Ever Lived
“This searching memoir pays homage to To the Lighthouse, while recounting the author’s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer. . . . Smyth’s writing is evocative and incisive.”—The New Yorker
“Like H Is for Hawk, Smyth’s book is a memoir that’s not quite a memoir, using Woolf, and her obsession with Woolf, as a springboard to tell the story of her father’s vivid life and sad demise due to alcoholism and cancer. .  . . An experiment in twenty-first century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh.”—Vogue
“Deeply moving – part memoir, part literary criticism, part outpouring of longing and grief… This is a beautiful book about the wildness of mortal  life, and the tenuous consolations of art.”—The Times Literary Supplement
“Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story... gently entwining observations from Woolf's classic with her own layered experience. Smyth tells us of her love for her father, his profound alcoholism and the unpredictable course of the cancer that ultimately claimed his life.”—Time

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 29, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781984844880
      • File size: 253584 KB
      • Duration: 08:48:17

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Brittany Pressley's stunning narration captures the difficult process of a cancer diagnosis, hospice care, and, ultimately, losing a parent--all of which is heard through a loving analysis of the writing of Virginia Woolf. As a young college student, Smyth studies the works of Woolf and also comes face to face with the diagnosis of her father's bladder cancer. Pressley steps through the words of this literary memoir with great care, providing just the right emphasis for the difficult passages about loss before powerfully delivering the elegant passages from some of Woolf's greatest works. It can be difficult to keep tragedy and hope balanced in the delivery of a memoir, but Pressley provides the perfect blend in this performance. V.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 11, 2019
      In this luminous debut memoir, Smyth, an editor at the Paris Review, recounts her father’s life and death, while referring to Virginia Woolf and her novel To the Lighthouse as a counterpoint to her own experiences of love and family attachment. An only child born to two Boston architects, Smyth idolized her father, a self-proclaimed nihilist who is beguiling, affectionate, and self-destructive, “the cynosure of all eyes.” Diagnosed with kidney cancer at 46 when the author was 11, Geoffrey Smyth continued to smoke and drink; throughout the next 14 years his family endured his battles with bladder and lung cancers until his death. Smyth moves effortlessly through the narrative, whether detailing her father’s illness or reveling in powerful memories (making a dollhouse together; her father swimming amid jellyfish off the coast of Rhode Island). Examining her parents’ marriage, Smyth turns to Woolf’s reflections on the institution, specifically in the relationship between Woolf and her husband, Leonard: “Marriage to Leonard may at times have felt like servitude, but it could also be an overwhelming source of joy.” This is a moving and fascinating portrait of a father and his daughter’s unyielding devotion.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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