A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own lives—and see clearly the people we love most.
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.
About the Author
Katharine Smyth is a graduate of Brown University. She has worked for The Paris Review and taught at Columbia University, where she received her MFA in nonfiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Praise For…
Nylon: “6 Great Books to Read This January”
Town & Country: “The Best New Books to Read This January”
Praise for All the Lives We Ever Lived:
“Beautifully written…a gift to readers drawn to big questions about time, memory, mortality, love and grief… you’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.”
— Heller McAlpin, Wall Street Journal
“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 loe for her father, his profound alcoholism and hte unpredictable course of the cancer that ultimately claimed his life.”
— TIME
“This gorgeous, moving book gracefully moves between memoir and literary criticism…. Smyth’s writing possesses a unique ability to wend its way into your head, traveling into all the darkest corners of your mind, triggering thoughts on love and loss and family and memory you hadn’t known were lurking; it’s a profound experience, reading this book—one not to be missed.”
— Nylon
