A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
One of Town & Country’s Best Books of 2019
An Australian Book Review Book of the Year 2019
One of Vulture’s Best Books of 2019 (So Far)
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.
Katharine’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, Katharine 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.
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SELECTED REVIEWS
“This is a transcendent book, not a simple meditation on one woman’s loss, but a reflection on all of our losses, on loss itself, on how to remember and commemorate our dead.” — The Washington Post
“A deft blend of memoir, biography, and literary criticism that’s a gift to readers drawn to big questions about time, memory, mortality, love and grief… You’d be hard pressed to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.” — The Wall Street Journal
“Evocative and incisive.” — The New Yorker
“[Smyth’s] prose is so fluid and clear throughout that it’s not surprising to observe her view of her family, its cracks and fissures, sharpen into unsparing focus.… Her book could itself become solace for people navigating their way through the complexities of grief for their fallen idols. And they will be lucky to have it.” — The New York Times Book Review
“An experiment in 21st-century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh.” — Vogue
“Deeply moving… a beautiful book about the wildness of mortal life, and the tenuous consolations of art.” — The Times Literary Supplement