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All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
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.
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.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 29, 2019
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5379 people want to read
About the author
Katharine Smyth
2 books48 followersKatharine 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.
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March 15, 2019
“All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf” (2019) is written by Katharine Smyth, and is an articulate exploration of literary criticism combined with a deeply personal memoir and tribute to the life and death of her beloved father who passed away from cancer and alcohol related conditions. Smyth is a graduate from Brown University, with a MFA in nonfiction.
While studying at Oxford and visiting her grandmother, Smyth and her parents embarked on a “Virginia Woolf Road Trip” where they toured the massive Knole House estate (Vita Sackville-West), the country home of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, the Berwick Church, and finally, the “Monks House” (Rodmell) of Virginia and Lenard Woolf. The house was dark and shabby inside, the worn furniture included “spindly inhospitable” chairs, and faded paintings. The sunny writing room/studio where Woolf produced “To The Lighthouse” (1927) was at the back of the house, 22 pages of the manuscript was on her desk, with pages from her diary, and a single tea cup. The gardens were most memorable: paths of “weathered stones” led to the flowerbeds that extended to a yard and shaded pool. The tour took place on a warm sunny day, though her father was ill and walked slowly, hunched over, he had already endured many treatments for his poor health that included brief stay in a rehab facility for alcoholism.
To The Lighthouse is the novel that Virginia Woolf wrote to deal with her shattering grief over the loss of her mother when she was a child, and years later, two siblings and her father as a young adult. The novel is about the Ramsey family and how profound grief shaped their life following the loss of Mrs. Ramsey, wife and mother: “The things that bound families and life together had been out of a family fight. Mr. Ramsey wanted to go to the lighthouse…..”
In addition to finding solace in literature, Smyth wrote of her longing for the ritualized comfort of religion and/or a God she didn’t believe in. Grief over the loss of her father was terribly agonizing for her, with a “shapelessness” of loss that unexpressed invited its own form of hypocrisy.
Some of the passages are exquisitely lyrically written, particularly the nature writing at the Rhode Island summer home of her parents— reflections at the water’s edge, the ducks, birds, plants, the elements of weather. Smyth’s college professor observed how well she understood and was attuned to Woolf’s writing. Athough with the endless and unknown amounts of manuscripts reports and articles commonly available worldwide by notable Woolf scholars, this book may or may not stand out.
The healthcare and treatments combined with the very slow detailed agonizing death process of her father—in many ways this was just TMI, and certainly could have been condensed on many levels as to preserve his dignity and privacy. I couldn’t help but wonder about Smyth’s mother’s part in the story, it seemed odd that Smyth had so little to say about her. The stories of her father’s friends and lovers were very interesting, the audiobook added to the appeal of the storyline. 3* With thanks to the Seattle Public Library.
While studying at Oxford and visiting her grandmother, Smyth and her parents embarked on a “Virginia Woolf Road Trip” where they toured the massive Knole House estate (Vita Sackville-West), the country home of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, the Berwick Church, and finally, the “Monks House” (Rodmell) of Virginia and Lenard Woolf. The house was dark and shabby inside, the worn furniture included “spindly inhospitable” chairs, and faded paintings. The sunny writing room/studio where Woolf produced “To The Lighthouse” (1927) was at the back of the house, 22 pages of the manuscript was on her desk, with pages from her diary, and a single tea cup. The gardens were most memorable: paths of “weathered stones” led to the flowerbeds that extended to a yard and shaded pool. The tour took place on a warm sunny day, though her father was ill and walked slowly, hunched over, he had already endured many treatments for his poor health that included brief stay in a rehab facility for alcoholism.
To The Lighthouse is the novel that Virginia Woolf wrote to deal with her shattering grief over the loss of her mother when she was a child, and years later, two siblings and her father as a young adult. The novel is about the Ramsey family and how profound grief shaped their life following the loss of Mrs. Ramsey, wife and mother: “The things that bound families and life together had been out of a family fight. Mr. Ramsey wanted to go to the lighthouse…..”
In addition to finding solace in literature, Smyth wrote of her longing for the ritualized comfort of religion and/or a God she didn’t believe in. Grief over the loss of her father was terribly agonizing for her, with a “shapelessness” of loss that unexpressed invited its own form of hypocrisy.
Some of the passages are exquisitely lyrically written, particularly the nature writing at the Rhode Island summer home of her parents— reflections at the water’s edge, the ducks, birds, plants, the elements of weather. Smyth’s college professor observed how well she understood and was attuned to Woolf’s writing. Athough with the endless and unknown amounts of manuscripts reports and articles commonly available worldwide by notable Woolf scholars, this book may or may not stand out.
The healthcare and treatments combined with the very slow detailed agonizing death process of her father—in many ways this was just TMI, and certainly could have been condensed on many levels as to preserve his dignity and privacy. I couldn’t help but wonder about Smyth’s mother’s part in the story, it seemed odd that Smyth had so little to say about her. The stories of her father’s friends and lovers were very interesting, the audiobook added to the appeal of the storyline. 3* With thanks to the Seattle Public Library.
April 1, 2019
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I opened them and asked my seatmate for the time. We were still hours away, and I willed the seconds to pass, even as I had an image then of the death moment as a fracture that had split my life in two, and every minute, every mile, was a measure of the growing distance between me and the part of life I much preferred. Some ten years later, I'm still on that train.
The writing in this book is almost too good. In All the Lives We Ever Lived, Katharine Smyth intertwines a tale of the life and death of her father with wisdom she's gleaned from her favorite book, To the Lighthouse. It's a neat hook to hang a memoir on, but Smyth doesn't really need it. Perhaps this isn't surprising given that she reveres Virginia Woolf, but the personal (non-Lighthouse) parts of this book are so well done, vivid, eloquent, moving and (huge compliment from me) well-organized and cohesive, that all the Woolf stuff, interesting as it is, isn't really necessary. I would've happily read more about Smyth's own life instead! Still, as far as criticisms go, that's a pretty mild one. I genuinely did like all the explication of To the Lighthouse; I just liked the personal stuff more. Overall, I was really impressed by this. Recommended!
The writing in this book is almost too good. In All the Lives We Ever Lived, Katharine Smyth intertwines a tale of the life and death of her father with wisdom she's gleaned from her favorite book, To the Lighthouse. It's a neat hook to hang a memoir on, but Smyth doesn't really need it. Perhaps this isn't surprising given that she reveres Virginia Woolf, but the personal (non-Lighthouse) parts of this book are so well done, vivid, eloquent, moving and (huge compliment from me) well-organized and cohesive, that all the Woolf stuff, interesting as it is, isn't really necessary. I would've happily read more about Smyth's own life instead! Still, as far as criticisms go, that's a pretty mild one. I genuinely did like all the explication of To the Lighthouse; I just liked the personal stuff more. Overall, I was really impressed by this. Recommended!
February 23, 2019
This book is a memoir both of the author's experience of her father's death and her reading of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Smyth is a skillful writer and her accounting of her father's illness and death brought me to tears, large due to its power in reminding me of my own mother's death many years ago. Her musings on the nature of death were both affecting and interesting.
But for me the greatest value in this book is its use of Woolf's book to illuminate the author's experience and her understanding of it. The great gift of this book is that it brought me back to Woolf's, rereading it for the third or fourth time and getting more out of it than ever. Smyth's use of quotations cast new light, or at least a new way of seeing and even using the Woolf book, bringing it even closer to my own life.
I love these books (like My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, a work I found exceptionally excellent and helpful in appreciating Eliot's work) that reflect the authors' engagement with other works of literature. They speak to my life as a reader, the way in which certain books become guides, works with which we have a special relationship.
This is an interesting book for those who love Woolf, those interested in experiences of grief, and those of us who just like to read about other readers.
But for me the greatest value in this book is its use of Woolf's book to illuminate the author's experience and her understanding of it. The great gift of this book is that it brought me back to Woolf's, rereading it for the third or fourth time and getting more out of it than ever. Smyth's use of quotations cast new light, or at least a new way of seeing and even using the Woolf book, bringing it even closer to my own life.
I love these books (like My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, a work I found exceptionally excellent and helpful in appreciating Eliot's work) that reflect the authors' engagement with other works of literature. They speak to my life as a reader, the way in which certain books become guides, works with which we have a special relationship.
This is an interesting book for those who love Woolf, those interested in experiences of grief, and those of us who just like to read about other readers.
September 10, 2019
A truly remarkable read. The author harnessed the power of Virginia Woolf in the telling of her story. So many bells were rung and so many things resonated as I read.
Woolf always resonates with me in a way that few in my life truly understand, but that’s not the only reason this memoir resonated. While my parents are alive, my mother is terminally ill and my father recently became seriously ill.
By structuring this memoir by adding in Woolf’s iconic novel, it just made it all the more poignant. I really liked how the author would share a passage from “To the Lighthouse” and then tie that to Virginia’s real life and then tie all of that to her own. It’s not necessary that you have read or loved Woolf’s novel to enjoy this memoir, but it will make it all the more poignant if you have and if you do.
I’m doing something similar with Hemingway’s “Moveable Feast” for a novel I’m working on. I’m also using the life of the author of “Dracula” and weaving that into another novel, a modern day gothic workplace tale (both based on true stories). Anyway, it was a pleasure to read someone else do this with a novel I love.
The way Woolf measured her happiness against the memory of being in her childhood home by the beach was apparent in her writing. The author of this memoir had a similar experience. I think we all do. There is one home that I lived in until I was eight. Another family lives there now but it is where I feel tied. It’s where things happened. It’s where I was most myself until I wasn’t. When I think of home, I think of this place up on the hill with that view of the water.
I love the moment when the author realizes that her father had a life before her. It’s one of those things that doesn’t occur to children very often - that their parents had a full life before they arrived.
I loved how the author talked of marriage: the author’s and her parents and Virginia’s and her parents. There was something so intoxicating about how she wove that chapter together.
The prose in this memoir on its own didn’t have poetry, except when Woolf was interjected (it’s hard to juxtapose one’s prose next to Woolf’s and I find the author brave to do so). But the way she wove the story was poetic as a whole. And her skill as a writer is excellent. The words never distracted from her meaning.
When the author talks of sitting at the dinner table when her father was drunk, it rung some bells. My father was an alcoholic but I have no memories like this about him (my parents split when I was young). What this scene reminded me of was dinner with my mom and her significant other and his young son Cory. Their story is another novel on my list to write.
The scene the author describes when going to a picnic on the day Princess Di dies rang some bells. Two actually.My mom was staying at my condo during the funeral because her alcoholic boyfriend always got very drunk when big news stories happened. I remember her licking her wounds on my couch watching the funeral. The big one though involves the most potent early memory I have of my father. It involved my father, mother, my brother and I climbing into the car to mail a letter and to go to the store. My father was drunk so my mother was going to drive. She tapped him on the shoulder asking him to hold the letter and all hell broke loose. It ended with me and my brother on the stairs screaming at our father to stop beating our mother against the garage door in the driveway. I see the memory from up above and across the street. The memory today is like a movie in my head. No one called the police though the neighbors saw it. People just didn’t call the police back then when seeing something like that. After it was over, I sat on the edge of the bathtub watching my mom examine her bloody head. My father came into the bathroom cheerfully like armegeddon hadn’t just happened, and asked who wanted to go with him to mail the letter. I said I would go. My mother said “No one is going anywhere.” My heart sunk for two reasons, first because things would never be the same as they were before and secondly it was the first time I had betrayed myself by not being truthful about what I felt. I didn’t want to go with my dad, I was mad at him, but I so much wanted to go back in time so I lied and said I wanted to go with him. It was the first time I lied. And then I felt like shit because I had betrayed my mom who was bleeding from her head. The first brick in my personal wall was laid that day. My world had turned upside down and I went deep through the looking glass. Nothing would ever be what it was. I no longer would be who I was, who I was meant to be. This is the same year I lost my cherry to a Barbie Doll and I fainted in kindergarten when in a circle with someone in the middle showing-and-telling a white rabbit. I ended up in a strange world alone in a hospital. I didn’t realize until years later all of these things probably drew me to Alice’s adventures. I was Alice from that day forward. I even looked like the original drawings. It is from this space that I first met Woolf.
As the author looks at death and the void that comes after, I was struck at how she so poetically braided the layers. It was so beautiful and masterful how she crafted some of the passages. Her discussion of grief was very powerful. A must read.
When she writes of gliding back and forth between memories, all of them set atop the other like transparencies, it reminded me of an epiphany I had circa 1999 where I saw every moment happening at once. The image makes perfect sense but I will have to paint it someday in hopes the words might come to describe it. To date, words are not enough.
The most poignant part of the book is when the author writes of death. How when someone we love dies, how we find ourselves in the past with such urgency. It is the only place our loved one resides. Near death, the majority of time is spent in the past. It’s like we die in the past and not the present. My mom who is dying talks about the past more and more. When I took care of my grandmother her last year of life she did the same thing. She had trouble remembering what happened five minutes before sometimes but she had vivid detailed memories of her past. Those memories were more vibrant and alive than her present. We all live a lot in the past and the future, but maybe when one is dying, the future is quelled and only the past remains.
There is so much about this novel that was beautiful and hard and completely worth my time. This is a book that will leave behind gifts to open for years to come. There are some passages that will leave your heart pounding and others that will have you forgetting to breath. I can’t recommend this memoir highly enough.
Woolf always resonates with me in a way that few in my life truly understand, but that’s not the only reason this memoir resonated. While my parents are alive, my mother is terminally ill and my father recently became seriously ill.
By structuring this memoir by adding in Woolf’s iconic novel, it just made it all the more poignant. I really liked how the author would share a passage from “To the Lighthouse” and then tie that to Virginia’s real life and then tie all of that to her own. It’s not necessary that you have read or loved Woolf’s novel to enjoy this memoir, but it will make it all the more poignant if you have and if you do.
I’m doing something similar with Hemingway’s “Moveable Feast” for a novel I’m working on. I’m also using the life of the author of “Dracula” and weaving that into another novel, a modern day gothic workplace tale (both based on true stories). Anyway, it was a pleasure to read someone else do this with a novel I love.
The way Woolf measured her happiness against the memory of being in her childhood home by the beach was apparent in her writing. The author of this memoir had a similar experience. I think we all do. There is one home that I lived in until I was eight. Another family lives there now but it is where I feel tied. It’s where things happened. It’s where I was most myself until I wasn’t. When I think of home, I think of this place up on the hill with that view of the water.
I love the moment when the author realizes that her father had a life before her. It’s one of those things that doesn’t occur to children very often - that their parents had a full life before they arrived.
I loved how the author talked of marriage: the author’s and her parents and Virginia’s and her parents. There was something so intoxicating about how she wove that chapter together.
The prose in this memoir on its own didn’t have poetry, except when Woolf was interjected (it’s hard to juxtapose one’s prose next to Woolf’s and I find the author brave to do so). But the way she wove the story was poetic as a whole. And her skill as a writer is excellent. The words never distracted from her meaning.
When the author talks of sitting at the dinner table when her father was drunk, it rung some bells. My father was an alcoholic but I have no memories like this about him (my parents split when I was young). What this scene reminded me of was dinner with my mom and her significant other and his young son Cory. Their story is another novel on my list to write.
The scene the author describes when going to a picnic on the day Princess Di dies rang some bells. Two actually.My mom was staying at my condo during the funeral because her alcoholic boyfriend always got very drunk when big news stories happened. I remember her licking her wounds on my couch watching the funeral. The big one though involves the most potent early memory I have of my father. It involved my father, mother, my brother and I climbing into the car to mail a letter and to go to the store. My father was drunk so my mother was going to drive. She tapped him on the shoulder asking him to hold the letter and all hell broke loose. It ended with me and my brother on the stairs screaming at our father to stop beating our mother against the garage door in the driveway. I see the memory from up above and across the street. The memory today is like a movie in my head. No one called the police though the neighbors saw it. People just didn’t call the police back then when seeing something like that. After it was over, I sat on the edge of the bathtub watching my mom examine her bloody head. My father came into the bathroom cheerfully like armegeddon hadn’t just happened, and asked who wanted to go with him to mail the letter. I said I would go. My mother said “No one is going anywhere.” My heart sunk for two reasons, first because things would never be the same as they were before and secondly it was the first time I had betrayed myself by not being truthful about what I felt. I didn’t want to go with my dad, I was mad at him, but I so much wanted to go back in time so I lied and said I wanted to go with him. It was the first time I lied. And then I felt like shit because I had betrayed my mom who was bleeding from her head. The first brick in my personal wall was laid that day. My world had turned upside down and I went deep through the looking glass. Nothing would ever be what it was. I no longer would be who I was, who I was meant to be. This is the same year I lost my cherry to a Barbie Doll and I fainted in kindergarten when in a circle with someone in the middle showing-and-telling a white rabbit. I ended up in a strange world alone in a hospital. I didn’t realize until years later all of these things probably drew me to Alice’s adventures. I was Alice from that day forward. I even looked like the original drawings. It is from this space that I first met Woolf.
As the author looks at death and the void that comes after, I was struck at how she so poetically braided the layers. It was so beautiful and masterful how she crafted some of the passages. Her discussion of grief was very powerful. A must read.
When she writes of gliding back and forth between memories, all of them set atop the other like transparencies, it reminded me of an epiphany I had circa 1999 where I saw every moment happening at once. The image makes perfect sense but I will have to paint it someday in hopes the words might come to describe it. To date, words are not enough.
The most poignant part of the book is when the author writes of death. How when someone we love dies, how we find ourselves in the past with such urgency. It is the only place our loved one resides. Near death, the majority of time is spent in the past. It’s like we die in the past and not the present. My mom who is dying talks about the past more and more. When I took care of my grandmother her last year of life she did the same thing. She had trouble remembering what happened five minutes before sometimes but she had vivid detailed memories of her past. Those memories were more vibrant and alive than her present. We all live a lot in the past and the future, but maybe when one is dying, the future is quelled and only the past remains.
There is so much about this novel that was beautiful and hard and completely worth my time. This is a book that will leave behind gifts to open for years to come. There are some passages that will leave your heart pounding and others that will have you forgetting to breath. I can’t recommend this memoir highly enough.
December 18, 2019
Smyth first read To the Lighthouse in Christmas 2001, during her junior year abroad at Oxford. Shortly thereafter her father had surgery in Boston to remove his bladder, one of many operations he’d had during a decade battling cancer. But even this new health scare wasn’t enough to keep him from returning to his habitual three bottles of wine a day. Woolf was there for Smyth during this crisis and all the time leading up to her father’s death, with Lighthouse and Woolf’s own life reflecting Smyth’s experience in unanticipated ways. The Smyths’ Rhode Island beach house, for instance, was reminiscent of the Stephens’ home in Cornwall. Woolf’s mother’s death was an end to the summer visits, and to her childhood; Lighthouse would become her elegy to those bygone days.
Often a short passage by or about Woolf is enough to launch Smyth back into her memories. As an only child, she envied the busy family life of the Ramsays in Lighthouse. She delves into the mystery of her parents’ marriage and her father’s faltering architecture career. She also undertakes Woolf tourism, including the Cornwall cottage, Knole, Charleston and Monk’s House (where Woolf wrote most of Lighthouse). Her writing is dreamy, mingling past and present as she muses on time and grief. The passages of Woolf pastiche are obvious but short enough not to overstay their welcome. It’s a most unusual book in the conception, but for Woolf fans especially, it works. However, I wished I had read Lighthouse more recently than 16.5 years ago – it’s one to reread.
Why Woolf? “I think it’s Woolf’s mastery of moments like these—moments that hold up a mirror to our private tumult while also revealing how much we as humans share—that most draws me to her.”
Undergraduate wisdom: “Woolf’s technique: taking a very complex (usually female) character and using her mind as an emblem of all minds” [copied from notes I took during a lecture on To the Lighthouse in my Modern Wasteland course, sophomore year of college]
Also recommended: Virginia Woolf in Manhattan by Maggie Gee, Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar, and Adeline by Norah Vincent
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Often a short passage by or about Woolf is enough to launch Smyth back into her memories. As an only child, she envied the busy family life of the Ramsays in Lighthouse. She delves into the mystery of her parents’ marriage and her father’s faltering architecture career. She also undertakes Woolf tourism, including the Cornwall cottage, Knole, Charleston and Monk’s House (where Woolf wrote most of Lighthouse). Her writing is dreamy, mingling past and present as she muses on time and grief. The passages of Woolf pastiche are obvious but short enough not to overstay their welcome. It’s a most unusual book in the conception, but for Woolf fans especially, it works. However, I wished I had read Lighthouse more recently than 16.5 years ago – it’s one to reread.
Why Woolf? “I think it’s Woolf’s mastery of moments like these—moments that hold up a mirror to our private tumult while also revealing how much we as humans share—that most draws me to her.”
Undergraduate wisdom: “Woolf’s technique: taking a very complex (usually female) character and using her mind as an emblem of all minds” [copied from notes I took during a lecture on To the Lighthouse in my Modern Wasteland course, sophomore year of college]
Also recommended: Virginia Woolf in Manhattan by Maggie Gee, Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar, and Adeline by Norah Vincent
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
November 11, 2018
All the Lives We Ever Lived is an evocative portrait of the deep bond between the author and her dynamic, difficult father. It is an exploration of her overwhelming grief at his death. In her struggle to communicate the complexity of that experience, Smyth turns to Virginia Woolf, to the book that has long been her lodestar at life's most difficult moments: To the Lighthouse.
Smyth draws comparisons between her relationships and those of the characters in Woolf's masterwork. She admires how Woolf grapples with the deepest, most fundamental human questions about childhood memories, love, family life, and loss. Like Woolf, Smyth struggles to reach a sense of clarity in her experience of love and loss. She finds that capturing these essential aspects of humanity in words to be an elusive task.
The author herself has a beautiful way with language. This book made me want to read more of her work. I underlined many passages in this memoir and Smyth's love of Woolf's text certainly made me want to revisit it soon. I do think that I would have appreciated Smyth's dive into sections of To the Lighthouse much more if I had a fresher awareness of Woolf's novel. There were passages that didn't resonate as much for me because of this, and I do think readers do need to have read To the Lighthouse to appreciate this book.
All the Lives We Ever Lived did make me think about which book, if any book, would be that one for me, the one that I might come back to again and again for wisdom and guidance. You can have a lifelong relationship with a book, as Smyth proves here. The idea that there could be one book that would light the way for you through life is an irresistible thought for any reader. What would yours be?
Smyth draws comparisons between her relationships and those of the characters in Woolf's masterwork. She admires how Woolf grapples with the deepest, most fundamental human questions about childhood memories, love, family life, and loss. Like Woolf, Smyth struggles to reach a sense of clarity in her experience of love and loss. She finds that capturing these essential aspects of humanity in words to be an elusive task.
The author herself has a beautiful way with language. This book made me want to read more of her work. I underlined many passages in this memoir and Smyth's love of Woolf's text certainly made me want to revisit it soon. I do think that I would have appreciated Smyth's dive into sections of To the Lighthouse much more if I had a fresher awareness of Woolf's novel. There were passages that didn't resonate as much for me because of this, and I do think readers do need to have read To the Lighthouse to appreciate this book.
All the Lives We Ever Lived did make me think about which book, if any book, would be that one for me, the one that I might come back to again and again for wisdom and guidance. You can have a lifelong relationship with a book, as Smyth proves here. The idea that there could be one book that would light the way for you through life is an irresistible thought for any reader. What would yours be?
July 17, 2019
This woman’s poor mother. The book is dedicated to her, yet the father is over and over again described as the author’s favorite person, best friend, her family seems so lonely without him, her mother’s grief annoys her—to her credit, she later realizes she was a tad unfair on that front— but what DOES she give her mother, in this book, other than fuel for an inferiority complex? Some recognition of her strength that seems tacked on. Maybe if she’d REALLY taken another look at her mom this would’ve been a more interesting book, but she only has eyes for her father.
I really have a hard time, no matter how well something is written, enjoying a book by someone who, through their own narration, I come to dislike. I don’t feel there’s a ton of depth or growth in this book, or revelation. As someone who likes To the Lighthouse, and lost my own father, I had really looked forward to this book. But I felt mostly unmoved, and often annoyed by the self-absorption.
I really have a hard time, no matter how well something is written, enjoying a book by someone who, through their own narration, I come to dislike. I don’t feel there’s a ton of depth or growth in this book, or revelation. As someone who likes To the Lighthouse, and lost my own father, I had really looked forward to this book. But I felt mostly unmoved, and often annoyed by the self-absorption.
June 17, 2019
This was fine, but it left me asking "why am I reading this when I could just be reading To the Lighthouse again?"
August 20, 2022
More like 3.5 stars. Beautifully written but I can't help feeling for the memoirist's mother. And it just went on longer than I felt necessary. I enjoyed it more when I was reading the first half in little chunks so it is probably on me having to power through the last 3rd of it. But again, beautifully written. So 3.5 for me.
January 5, 2019
I won this book as a giveaway. It’s an alright read. It’s a memoir where the author compares her life to Virginia Woolf life as well as her Lighthouse novel. The author clearly shows comparisons and the book is a nice and easy read. I can see someone loving this book while others may not. Depends on what you like to read
June 17, 2019
Any author who describes her passionate engagement with Virginia Woolf’s writing will instantly grab my attention. So when I saw how Katharine Smyth’s memoir “All the Lives We Ever Lived” is about her process of finding solace in reading Woolf’s novel “To the Lighthouse” amidst the prolonged illness and death of her father I was drawn to it. My experience was further enhanced by reading this book along with fellow YouTubers Britta Bohler and Kendra Winchester. We left each other wonderfully long geeky messages about our reactions to the book and general thoughts about Virginia Woolf’s life and work. I think this is what makes this book something more than a traditional memoir – it’s a communion for anyone who has been deeply affected by Woolf’s writing. Smyth mimics the structure of “To the Lighthouse” to tell her own experiences before, during and after her father’s illness to mirror the three sections of Woolf’s novel. But she also interjects how her experiences and emotions are informed by her reading as well as meditating on the life of Woolf herself. In this way the author creatively approaches the experience of grief and mourning, the complexity of how we feel about our families and how our relationship with art and literature is often deeply personal.
Read my full review of All the Lives We Ever Lived by Katharine Smyth on LonesomeReader
Read my full review of All the Lives We Ever Lived by Katharine Smyth on LonesomeReader
April 22, 2019
Oh my goodness. I picked this book up because i was caught with nothing to occupy my time at a Library volunteer function. I was hooked after three pages. Perhaps it hit me a little harder because my father passed in October. The author was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and, after her father (who was her favorite parent, maybe her favorite person despite his selfishness) dies she goes back to the book, trying to deal with the finality of his death. She finds things in his past of which she had no idea, and a few times takes issue with her mother that the author's loss was as great as her mother's loss. She assists with his care during his final hospital stay and is surprised when, after a spell of 'good', she goes back to school and her father dies the day after she leaves. She dreams about him, talks of things that happened and visits places they went together. This is a very touching book, although I have to admit I don't think I would have liked her father much.
March 7, 2020
A must read for any fans of Woolf.
February 20, 2023
What a poignant meditation on grief and memory and family. I can’t quite remember anything better on the topic of loss. It’s also an effective if strikingly painful introduction to Virginia Woolf’s famous book, To the Lighthouse, which I ended up reading for the first time alongside this book. All the Lives We’ve Ever Lived is beautifully written. I kept thinking that the blend of memoir and literary criticism shouldn’t really work, but it does. The passages on Woolf and her novel alternate seamlessly with the passages on the author’s reflections about her father’s successes, failures, alcoholism, and disease. And the result is that Katharine Smyth and Woolf reinforce one another as they separately attempt to illuminate the way death so often rends the fabric of time and place. Warning: the book will make you miss loved ones, and both the times and places they used to inhabit.
July 7, 2019
Overall a lovely book about one of my favorite books. I also was intrigued with how author Smyth tied her own experiences of grief with that of the family and friends of the people in To the Lighthouse, and skillfully showed how Woolf mined her own experiences with grief to write that book.
May 1, 2019
I was intrigued, as a fellow Woolf devotee, but I found my attention wandering. Smyth is a strong writer, but I wanted this to be either a grief memoir or a meditation on Woolf, not both.
June 17, 2019
I liked the way the ocean is a constant presence, the way it is in Woolf's work, and Smyth's loving look at the novel got me rereading it.
December 3, 2019
This book really snuck up on me and ended up being one of the best books I've read this year. To really appreciate it you do have to share my romantic notions about the importance of fiction. But the way the author wove together her own life with Woolf's life and Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse reminded me of the way books allow you to communicate and find kinship with authors you've never met, how you can in a way converse with authors who died long before you were born. I loved it.
October 30, 2019
An interesting take on a memoir and very well done. However, it took me awhile to get into this book and I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if I had read TO THE LIGHTHOUSE and knew more about Virginia Woolf. It’s a bit overwhelming to try and keep track of everyone and which of the families are being discussed at certain points.
August 10, 2019
Katharine Smyth is an excellent writer whose knowledge of Virginia Woolf is inspirational. She finds solace in her father's death to a comparison of their family's life to that of the Ramsay's in To the Lighthouse. Impressive.
January 27, 2019
The death of her father has left Katharine pondering about her life and the people playing major roles in it. Amongst them is not only her family but also Virginia Woolf whose works deeply impressed her when she was a student at Oxford. The parallels between “To the Lighthouse” and her own life are stunning, especially when it comes to the impact that places have on the people. It is her family’s summer house in Rhode Island that first and foremost underlines this impression. Re-reading Virginia Woolf gives her the opportunity to understand her grief as well as her family relationships and to finally cope with her father’s passing.
Katharine Smyth makes it easy for the reader to follow her thoughts. Even though it is some years since I last read “To the Lighthouse”, I could effortlessly find my way back into the novel and see the thread that Smyth also saw. I found it an interesting approach for a memoir or biography and I liked it a lot.
There are two major aspects that I’d like to mention. First of all, Katharine Smyth cleverly shows how literature can help to overcome hard situations and to find solace in reading. It has been a concept since the ancient times, the classic Greek drama with its purgatory function and the possibility of a katharsis which helps you to sort out your feelings and opens the way to go on in life. Second, I also appreciated the author’s frankness. It is certainly not easy to write about the own father’s addiction and his slow deterioration, yet, the process of writing might have helped her, too, and embellishing things would have been counterproductive here.
An interesting memoir which was also beautifully written that made me think about which novel I would pick as a parallel to my own life.
Katharine Smyth makes it easy for the reader to follow her thoughts. Even though it is some years since I last read “To the Lighthouse”, I could effortlessly find my way back into the novel and see the thread that Smyth also saw. I found it an interesting approach for a memoir or biography and I liked it a lot.
There are two major aspects that I’d like to mention. First of all, Katharine Smyth cleverly shows how literature can help to overcome hard situations and to find solace in reading. It has been a concept since the ancient times, the classic Greek drama with its purgatory function and the possibility of a katharsis which helps you to sort out your feelings and opens the way to go on in life. Second, I also appreciated the author’s frankness. It is certainly not easy to write about the own father’s addiction and his slow deterioration, yet, the process of writing might have helped her, too, and embellishing things would have been counterproductive here.
An interesting memoir which was also beautifully written that made me think about which novel I would pick as a parallel to my own life.
July 28, 2019
Katharine Smyth idolized her father. He was her hero and the person with who she had long talks, both growing up and as an adult. She also idealized her parent’s marriage. But her father, and the marriage, had a rather large dark side. He was an alcoholic who was a tyrant to her mother, one who raved and threw things. To make things worse, after his cancer diagnosis, he continued to drink and smoke.
Smyth went on a quest to discover who, really, her father was, back before he met her mother or was her father. She interviews people from his past. And then she pairs her own story of love and loss with that of Virginia Woolf, the author of Smyth’s favorite book “To the Lighthouse”. THL acted as a map for her own grief.
This book is a meditation on not just Smyth’s own loss, but everyone’s losses, “Loss” with a capital L. It provides a clear look at death. It would help, I think, if one has read “To the Lighthouse” (a book about Woolf’s grief over losing her mother when she was a child) prior to reading this book; I had not, and frequently felt I was missing something.
Most of the book is about the author’s father and his death- in great detail. Little is written about her mother until after the father dies. Smyth and her mother had always walked on eggshells, because her father could be a real nasty drunk. One minute he’d be warm and wonderful, the next he was in a rage. I found the author’s idolization of her father rather disturbing. Why not, instead, worship her mother, who put up with so much? But you can’t apply logic to love. It is what it is. This book is a great example of how books can help us understand ourselves, our families, and our emotions.
Smyth went on a quest to discover who, really, her father was, back before he met her mother or was her father. She interviews people from his past. And then she pairs her own story of love and loss with that of Virginia Woolf, the author of Smyth’s favorite book “To the Lighthouse”. THL acted as a map for her own grief.
This book is a meditation on not just Smyth’s own loss, but everyone’s losses, “Loss” with a capital L. It provides a clear look at death. It would help, I think, if one has read “To the Lighthouse” (a book about Woolf’s grief over losing her mother when she was a child) prior to reading this book; I had not, and frequently felt I was missing something.
Most of the book is about the author’s father and his death- in great detail. Little is written about her mother until after the father dies. Smyth and her mother had always walked on eggshells, because her father could be a real nasty drunk. One minute he’d be warm and wonderful, the next he was in a rage. I found the author’s idolization of her father rather disturbing. Why not, instead, worship her mother, who put up with so much? But you can’t apply logic to love. It is what it is. This book is a great example of how books can help us understand ourselves, our families, and our emotions.
February 5, 2019
How does one even go about rating and reviewing the memoirs of another? Something I had never previously had occasion to ask myself. What I will say is that I appreciate the author making To the Lighthouse and Virginia Woolf accessible.
I had tried to read Lighthouse previously, because it is such a classic, and I would have felt remiss if I did not, but the writing style of Woolf, with the endless commas, sentences which stretch on forever, I think called stream-of-consciousness, sentences which take up an entire paragraph, indeed even half a page, such as this one, were simply too exhausting and convoluted for this poor reader to follow, and, as such, could not fully appreciate Lighthouse until Smyth came along.
I've always admired authors like Smyth who can write about such intensely personal subjects. The description of All the Lives We Ever Lived is accurate, so if you think it's a book you'd like, you will.
I had tried to read Lighthouse previously, because it is such a classic, and I would have felt remiss if I did not, but the writing style of Woolf, with the endless commas, sentences which stretch on forever, I think called stream-of-consciousness, sentences which take up an entire paragraph, indeed even half a page, such as this one, were simply too exhausting and convoluted for this poor reader to follow, and, as such, could not fully appreciate Lighthouse until Smyth came along.
I've always admired authors like Smyth who can write about such intensely personal subjects. The description of All the Lives We Ever Lived is accurate, so if you think it's a book you'd like, you will.
July 12, 2020
I enjoyed this story, and in particular I enjoyed how it wove Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse" into the author's memoir. The descriptions of the family week-ender at Rhode Island put me right there, at the scene. The reflections on her parents' lives, and their effect on the author's life, was intriguing and surprising, given the alcoholism of her father. I've been reading "To The Lighthouse" in tandem with Katharine Smyth's book; I am reading Ms Woolf's book with a greater understanding, than I may have if I hadn't read Ms Smyth's book.
April 22, 2019
Love the analysis of Woolf. The end of the book suffered from what the author herself pointed out as the simple inability to come to a “truth” about the reality/process of mourning. But rather than acknowledge and stop, there seemed to be a stubborn determination to persist. I feel it diluted the prose. But I also feel that maybe my evaluation is borne of the privilege of not really understanding.
February 21, 2019
It’s a very well written and personal meditation on grief though the lens of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. A detailed knowledge of that book would add value to the reading experience.
March 6, 2019
An elegant memoir of the unbreakable bond between a daughter and her father using literary scholarship (Rhode Island, Boston, also England, Australia; roughly 1980s to present-day): There are many ways to describe this heartbreaker of a memoir about an only child who loses her beloved yet enigmatic, alcoholic father.
Katharine Smyth misses her father terribly, yearns to better understand him, which means reconciling conflicted memories of him. She wants to see him in the best light – Light a constant thread – not through a child’s adoring eyes (“a child [who] danced on the top of his feet”), but as an adult often disappointed and disgusted by his “recklessness.”
Smyth’s father remains nameless until the acknowledgements, a nod to the mystery of him. He died at 55 to cancer, hastened (if not brought on) by self-destructive behaviors. Truth is, and Smyth writes candidly, she’d been losing him many years before.
How can someone go from “the most gentle and loving being” to an unrecognizable “brutish stranger”? Be so “anti-life” yet “hold such life within”? What happened to the man who seemed happy when they sailed and swam together? Once so energetic, so full of life, then so full of “exhaustion and sourness.” If, as the author concludes, he was “born an alcoholic,” was he ever truly happy? Happy enough? What was the meaning of his life?
Smyth has been struggling with these complicated questions for at least the past ten years, which is how long she says she’s been writing about him. Seems much longer, going back to when she was eleven when she started a diary. Even with all those years of reflections, her impressions of him keep shape-shifting. Understandable, as he was complex, a nasty drunk, and her mother was private and distant, silent and absent during all those troubling years.
This testament to a daughter’s unbreakable attachment to and love for her father is profound. Her teenage years were emotional roller coasters as she (and her mother) walked on eggshells, so erratic and unpredictable was he. Yet she, not her mother, was his primary caretaker (minus the years she was sent to boarding school, a godsend). Not a slight matter as her father underwent frequent cancer treatments, sometimes every three months, in and out of hospitals. When the disease spread, his last hospitalization was lengthy, torturous. “How can people be asked to endure this?” asks the daughter who never left her father’s side.
Smyth seeks existential answers from Virginia Woolf, her literary idol, who counsels “life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive.” As the subtitle suggests, the author applies Woolf’s early 20th century inner thoughts (from letters, essays, diaries) and fiction to 21st century loneliness and grief to enlighten her. Perhaps Woolf is right: you can never truly know someone. But the beautiful thing about the author’s impressive effort is not wanting to accept the darker view. In elegant prose, she strives to find the light.
Where better than in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, which as far as the author is concerned “tells the story of everything.” This is the book she holds dear above all books. (“Perhaps there is one book for every life.”) Even if you haven’t read it or remember it, the author shows how relatable it is to her life starting with a favored parent (the mother, Mrs. Ramsey) at the heart of a family and a marriage.
Woolf spent her childhood in a house by the sea and the light (“the purest ecstasy I can conceive”) in Cornwall, England with a view of the Godrevy Lighthouse, where she summered as a child. (Fictionally, she moved the house, sea, and light to the Isle of Skye in Scotland.)
Virginia Woolf’s real and fictionalized homes remind the author of an 1890s house with a waterfront deck in Rhode Island she spent happy summers. The Cornwall home was “the most important of all memories,” wrote Woolf. True for Smyth and once upon a time for her father.
The author knows Virginia Woolf intimately; she’s the subject of her master’s thesis. (Her father was also from England; the author studied at Oxford and fondly recollects those days.) Other Woolf writings (and biographer analyses) are sometimes blended in, all often within the same paragraph. Stylistically, the memoir reflects some of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness modernism, including use of Woolf’s bracketed parenthetical thoughts. So there’s plenty of literary food for thought.
We can also examine the memoir psychologically, as this is a sad story about what happens to a person’s psyche when they become unemployed and it drags on and on. The author’s father never really made a comeback from a creatively satisfying architectural career (her mother also an architect) when he lost that job to the recession in the ‘80s. A tragic example of how job loss can spiral downward triggering heavy, constant drinking (and smoking).
Another psychological factor is the extent to which the “unique psychology of sickness” (Woolf’s prophetic words, having committed suicide) fueled her father’s depression and alcoholism, a toxic mix coupled with the psychological damage caused by joblessness.
Alcoholism affects the whole family. The memoir, then, is a window into the perniciousness of alcoholism victimizing a family, eating away at a marriage. (Though theirs didn’t end in divorce, a topic of consternation since the author’s marriage dissolved after four years.). The family goes on, but not without considerable sacrifices. “Marriage is a loss, a sacrifice of self and its expression,” says the author reflecting Woolf’s feminism.
All the Lives We Ever Lived raises many provocative issues, including a different perspective to consider only children other than the typical stereotype of spoiled brats.
The question of whether a child loves their father or mother more comes up. Let’s accept the question is a universal one owing to human nature and circumstances. The question that’s not universal is why an only child might have a more intense obsession for one parent over another? Adoration so acute and vital it becomes wrapped up in a fear life will become unbearable when that parent dies.
Only children like the author may carry a melancholy “sense of envy” of larger families, a kind of grief on its own for not being part of the “happy chaos of siblings” as seen in Woolf’s Ramsey family. Feelings of existential longing are practical too: not having a sister or a brother to comfort you, especially when you have to carry the burden of a dysfunctional family. Fiction, then, is not just for entertainment, escape, but to gain insight into ourselves by letting us inside how others live, act, and think.
The author also does us a service when she’s hit by how different her emotions are from societal expectations of grieving. She describes grief as “dreaminess,” “alienation,” “fogginess,” “formlessness.” But what she discovers is that for her it’s not the non-stop crying and falling-apart she dreaded for so many precious years.
Most remarkable is the lack of bitterness in the prose. Perhaps, in part, because the author’s idol shunned “sentimentality.” But we need to let Smyth shine here all on her own, admire her optimism to find her father’s lost light – “that astonishing light” – not just for the memory of him but for herself.
Tenderly and compassionately the author writes about wildlife by the water – great blue herons and swan egrets and creatures of the sea like starfish, oysters, horseshoe crabs. Poignantly observing species disappearing year after year, the prose cries out on climate change and how much Nature nourishes our well-being.
Ironically, in writing to better know her father, the author found a brighter light for her mother, for whom she dedicates her eloquent memoir to.
Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)
Katharine Smyth misses her father terribly, yearns to better understand him, which means reconciling conflicted memories of him. She wants to see him in the best light – Light a constant thread – not through a child’s adoring eyes (“a child [who] danced on the top of his feet”), but as an adult often disappointed and disgusted by his “recklessness.”
Smyth’s father remains nameless until the acknowledgements, a nod to the mystery of him. He died at 55 to cancer, hastened (if not brought on) by self-destructive behaviors. Truth is, and Smyth writes candidly, she’d been losing him many years before.
How can someone go from “the most gentle and loving being” to an unrecognizable “brutish stranger”? Be so “anti-life” yet “hold such life within”? What happened to the man who seemed happy when they sailed and swam together? Once so energetic, so full of life, then so full of “exhaustion and sourness.” If, as the author concludes, he was “born an alcoholic,” was he ever truly happy? Happy enough? What was the meaning of his life?
Smyth has been struggling with these complicated questions for at least the past ten years, which is how long she says she’s been writing about him. Seems much longer, going back to when she was eleven when she started a diary. Even with all those years of reflections, her impressions of him keep shape-shifting. Understandable, as he was complex, a nasty drunk, and her mother was private and distant, silent and absent during all those troubling years.
This testament to a daughter’s unbreakable attachment to and love for her father is profound. Her teenage years were emotional roller coasters as she (and her mother) walked on eggshells, so erratic and unpredictable was he. Yet she, not her mother, was his primary caretaker (minus the years she was sent to boarding school, a godsend). Not a slight matter as her father underwent frequent cancer treatments, sometimes every three months, in and out of hospitals. When the disease spread, his last hospitalization was lengthy, torturous. “How can people be asked to endure this?” asks the daughter who never left her father’s side.
Smyth seeks existential answers from Virginia Woolf, her literary idol, who counsels “life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive.” As the subtitle suggests, the author applies Woolf’s early 20th century inner thoughts (from letters, essays, diaries) and fiction to 21st century loneliness and grief to enlighten her. Perhaps Woolf is right: you can never truly know someone. But the beautiful thing about the author’s impressive effort is not wanting to accept the darker view. In elegant prose, she strives to find the light.
Where better than in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, which as far as the author is concerned “tells the story of everything.” This is the book she holds dear above all books. (“Perhaps there is one book for every life.”) Even if you haven’t read it or remember it, the author shows how relatable it is to her life starting with a favored parent (the mother, Mrs. Ramsey) at the heart of a family and a marriage.
Woolf spent her childhood in a house by the sea and the light (“the purest ecstasy I can conceive”) in Cornwall, England with a view of the Godrevy Lighthouse, where she summered as a child. (Fictionally, she moved the house, sea, and light to the Isle of Skye in Scotland.)
Virginia Woolf’s real and fictionalized homes remind the author of an 1890s house with a waterfront deck in Rhode Island she spent happy summers. The Cornwall home was “the most important of all memories,” wrote Woolf. True for Smyth and once upon a time for her father.
The author knows Virginia Woolf intimately; she’s the subject of her master’s thesis. (Her father was also from England; the author studied at Oxford and fondly recollects those days.) Other Woolf writings (and biographer analyses) are sometimes blended in, all often within the same paragraph. Stylistically, the memoir reflects some of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness modernism, including use of Woolf’s bracketed parenthetical thoughts. So there’s plenty of literary food for thought.
We can also examine the memoir psychologically, as this is a sad story about what happens to a person’s psyche when they become unemployed and it drags on and on. The author’s father never really made a comeback from a creatively satisfying architectural career (her mother also an architect) when he lost that job to the recession in the ‘80s. A tragic example of how job loss can spiral downward triggering heavy, constant drinking (and smoking).
Another psychological factor is the extent to which the “unique psychology of sickness” (Woolf’s prophetic words, having committed suicide) fueled her father’s depression and alcoholism, a toxic mix coupled with the psychological damage caused by joblessness.
Alcoholism affects the whole family. The memoir, then, is a window into the perniciousness of alcoholism victimizing a family, eating away at a marriage. (Though theirs didn’t end in divorce, a topic of consternation since the author’s marriage dissolved after four years.). The family goes on, but not without considerable sacrifices. “Marriage is a loss, a sacrifice of self and its expression,” says the author reflecting Woolf’s feminism.
All the Lives We Ever Lived raises many provocative issues, including a different perspective to consider only children other than the typical stereotype of spoiled brats.
The question of whether a child loves their father or mother more comes up. Let’s accept the question is a universal one owing to human nature and circumstances. The question that’s not universal is why an only child might have a more intense obsession for one parent over another? Adoration so acute and vital it becomes wrapped up in a fear life will become unbearable when that parent dies.
Only children like the author may carry a melancholy “sense of envy” of larger families, a kind of grief on its own for not being part of the “happy chaos of siblings” as seen in Woolf’s Ramsey family. Feelings of existential longing are practical too: not having a sister or a brother to comfort you, especially when you have to carry the burden of a dysfunctional family. Fiction, then, is not just for entertainment, escape, but to gain insight into ourselves by letting us inside how others live, act, and think.
The author also does us a service when she’s hit by how different her emotions are from societal expectations of grieving. She describes grief as “dreaminess,” “alienation,” “fogginess,” “formlessness.” But what she discovers is that for her it’s not the non-stop crying and falling-apart she dreaded for so many precious years.
Most remarkable is the lack of bitterness in the prose. Perhaps, in part, because the author’s idol shunned “sentimentality.” But we need to let Smyth shine here all on her own, admire her optimism to find her father’s lost light – “that astonishing light” – not just for the memory of him but for herself.
Tenderly and compassionately the author writes about wildlife by the water – great blue herons and swan egrets and creatures of the sea like starfish, oysters, horseshoe crabs. Poignantly observing species disappearing year after year, the prose cries out on climate change and how much Nature nourishes our well-being.
Ironically, in writing to better know her father, the author found a brighter light for her mother, for whom she dedicates her eloquent memoir to.
Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)
August 14, 2020
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf is a poetic, lyrical memoir by Katharine Smyth about her father, his slow death from alcoholism and cancer, and about the process of dying and of grief, of the unknowability of parents. It is a beautiful book, drawing in literary criticism and close analysis of To the Lighthouse to better reflect on Smyth's pain. Her writing is beautiful, from her descriptions of the Rhode Island house to the vividness with which she paints her memories of her father. It is so honest as to sometimes edge on cruel.
It had its issues. I think it was too long, allowing Smyth's thesis to get skewed among digressions that were beautiful but led to a feeling of scattered ideas. Occasionally Smyth's omissions felt strange. It's not surprising that sometimes Smyth is liable to find in Woolf what she wishes to see: that is Smyth's right, this is her book, about her own life. But her analysis can occasionally seem narrow, her commentary strange—her claim that Woolf's work lacks a sense of corporeality in terms of sex seems a bit empty, her brush over Vita Sackville-West to rest solely on Leonard Woolf when she discusses Virginia's ideas of romance or love, her glossing around Virginia's mental illness. Even so, the memoir was beautiful, and brutal, and I think had a lot to say about grief and the death of a parent.
It had its issues. I think it was too long, allowing Smyth's thesis to get skewed among digressions that were beautiful but led to a feeling of scattered ideas. Occasionally Smyth's omissions felt strange. It's not surprising that sometimes Smyth is liable to find in Woolf what she wishes to see: that is Smyth's right, this is her book, about her own life. But her analysis can occasionally seem narrow, her commentary strange—her claim that Woolf's work lacks a sense of corporeality in terms of sex seems a bit empty, her brush over Vita Sackville-West to rest solely on Leonard Woolf when she discusses Virginia's ideas of romance or love, her glossing around Virginia's mental illness. Even so, the memoir was beautiful, and brutal, and I think had a lot to say about grief and the death of a parent.
November 20, 2021
I’m currently reading my third Virginia Woolf novel and am becoming a bit obsessed. Not only do I want to read much more of her fiction and nonfiction, I also want to reread To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. I plan to do that in 2022.
This book, I feel, should not be read unless you’ve had the joy of discovering To The Lighthouse first. She weaves in the plot and characters of that plus Virginia Woolf’s own life and losses plus the author’s relationship with her father. I loved how all these things were woven together (I already used that term, but none other will do!)
I listened to the audiobook over several insomniac nights and I wonder if it would have been better spread out a little. For most of the book her father is ill and dying. She is a lovely writer and I could not stop listening (audiobook narrator was excellent) but I found myself very much anticipating and sometimes replaying the Woolf aspects of the story. I longed for more of that.
This book, I feel, should not be read unless you’ve had the joy of discovering To The Lighthouse first. She weaves in the plot and characters of that plus Virginia Woolf’s own life and losses plus the author’s relationship with her father. I loved how all these things were woven together (I already used that term, but none other will do!)
I listened to the audiobook over several insomniac nights and I wonder if it would have been better spread out a little. For most of the book her father is ill and dying. She is a lovely writer and I could not stop listening (audiobook narrator was excellent) but I found myself very much anticipating and sometimes replaying the Woolf aspects of the story. I longed for more of that.
Read
August 10, 2021not really interested in a memoir about the author's father and their Boston shore/sailboat/fly over to see family in the UK, hung out to dry on the beached skeleton of "to the Lighthouse". The book is definitely about her, not about VW. Didn't take long to find that out, a mis-pick for me. So DNF, do not rate.
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