Katharine Smyth

“There are some memoirs that reach right out and capture us, even if we have never heard of the author, even if the story seems ordinary, like the sort of thing we have experienced, or could imagine experiencing. Such is the case with Katharine Smyth’s extraordinary debut, All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf… 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.” — Charlotte Gordon, The Washington Post

“[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 exploration of grown-up love, the kind that accounts for who the loved one actually is, not who you want him or her to be, gains power and grace as her story unfolds. I suspect 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.” — Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review

“Katharine Smyth pulls off a tricky double homage in her beautifully written first book, 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… Her question—and this impressive memoir—beautifully echo my favorite passage from To the Lighthouse: ‘What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.’ Yes, here is one.” — Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal

“Just as Woolf unspooled the backstories and futures of her characters with deft, time-bending maneuvers, Smyth elliptically reveals the layers of her father’s character, simulating the ups and downs that the author herself must have felt in loving this extraordinary man and watching him self-destruct. It’s an experiment in 21st-century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh.” — Chloe Schama, Vogue

“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 reflections on loss weave in and out of literary criticism, and gesture toward questions about how art gives meaning to life, and vice versa… Smyth’s writing is evocative and incisive.” — The New Yorker

“A conceptually ambitious and assured debut, successfully bridging memoir and literary criticism…. A work of incisive observation and analysis, exquisite writing, and an attempt to determine if there is ‘any revelation that could lessen loss, that could help to make the fact of death okay.’” — Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“[Smyth] expertly dissects the finest gradations of emotion in any given scene… All the Lives We Ever Lived is a powerful book, driven by the engine of Smyth’s controlled, rich description. It’s an astonishingly clear-eyed portrait of a person through myriad lenses, a kind of prismatic attempt to capture a life.” — The Boston Globe

“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

“Let’s pause to recognize how remarkable it is that a young writer can convincingly buddy up with one of the greats in her first book without it coming off as a juvenile fanzine… Smyth’s beautiful debut is more tightly strung together than you’d imagine a memoir-cum-literary-requiem could be. It is innovative, like Woolf, in its power of association and its ability to transform the intangible nature of grief into a warm, graspable, fleshy mass.” — Hillary Kelly, Vulture

“Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story is a high-wire act for many reasons, not least being how few readers will have read Woolf themselves. But Smyth… is up to the challenge, gently entwining observations from Woolf’s classic with her own layered experience… In writing her own book, Smyth has discovered a way to appreciate the changing leaves, one that works both as memoir and as an aid to those who mourn.” — Time

“All the Lives We Ever Lived is both a reflection on To the Lighthouse and a lingeringly beautiful elegy in its own right…. What [Smyth’s] book does is add to our perception of To the Lighthouse, not through analysis or commentary, but by writing through the novel, assuming and exploring its worldview, and in the process redescribing it to us with an infectious passion and hard-earned wisdom… She writes with a measured, lyrical grace all her own.” — The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Smyth moves from the asperities of her own state to a lucid discussion of transience in general and the strange dream of any family—whose central characters abruptly vanish, never to return. This is a beautiful book about the wildness of mortal life, and the tenuous consolations of art.” — The Times Literary Supplement

“Her father had seemed 'impossibly wise' to her; seeing him through adult eyes, Smyth lays bare in raw and moving prose the impossibility of reconciling her idealised image with the man before her... Smyth is an elegant and powerful writer, her sentences suffused with attention to detail and rich with self-interrogation… [Her story is] not only an exploration of grief and family, but an effort to understand the complexity of experience and relationships, and to follow Woolf in her ‘ongoing struggle to find truth and meaning in a world where both are infinitely shifting.’” — Francesca Wade, Prospect Magazine

All the Lives We Ever Lived is both a haunting attempt to come to terms with loss and an honest appraisal of the ways in which a person can become unmoored. Acutely observed and shot through with a furious beauty, it is a book that lingers long after the final page has been turned.” — The i

“The memoir is a quiet book; its private tragedies are the consequence of a slow physical and emotional decay at the hands of her father’s disease. Still, Smyth’s prose pulsates with intensity, and its lyrical qualities make it a moving one. Grief and its disconcerting effects take center stage. ‘It’s writers like Woolf, their refusal to give in to popular ideas about bereavement, who have helped me to accept the nature of this misery,’ Smyth writes. With her first book, Smyth is able to give that comfort to a new generation of readers as well.” — BookPage

“A daughter coping with her father’s illness and death takes a deep dive into Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, looking for insight and comfort… Other writers have attempted similarly braided memoirs with mixed success. Katharine Smyth… has more than lived up to her premise, delivering a lyrical and thoughtful examination of character, place and grief.” — Providence Journal

“My highlight of the year is All the Lives We Ever Lived by Katharine Smyth. This book combines childhood memoir with grief over a beloved and deeply flawed father, difficulties with a very much alive and misunderstood mother, and the power and intimacy of reading. It’s a personal book with a far reach, and I loved it.” — Australian Book Review

“Smyth is an elegant writer and she explores her deep, complicated love for her father in lyrical yet restrained prose… Smyth’s book is a fine example of a fresh approach to literary criticism.” — Literary Review

“The affinity between Smyth and her subject is profound even on the sentence level. She writes in Woolfian rhythms. Her sentences cascade and linger over transcendent images; she nests tangential observations into parentheses to hint at the simultaneity of experience.” — Claire Fallon, HuffPost

“In All the Lives We Ever Lived, Katharine Smyth’s powerful memoir about her father’s death, she takes a parallel journey… What sets All the Lives apart from other memoirs about grief or alcoholism (and it has much to say about both topics) is that it is also a book about reading, the ways ‘the one book for every life’ can, in Smyth’s words, ‘reciprocate and even alter [our] experience’… There are many lovely moments when Smyth’s prose soars into poetry.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A critical and reflective delight… elegant and thorough and in several places stunning… All The Lives We Ever Lived reads at least in part as a steadfast refusal to countenance a pessimistic approach to life, insisting that even when the case seems desperate, one might find sufficiency in a moment.” — Review 31

“Literary criticism has rarely been this pleasurable to read, or as imperative… Just as no one else is likely to undertake a memoir about loss as viewed through the prism of a passion for falconry, no future book on grief and reading fiction ought now to be contemplated. Because All the Lives We Ever Lived has definitively, and beautifully, consumed this particular scheme. I can imagine Woolf giving it her highest praise: it is enough.” — The Barnes & Noble Review

“In All the Lives We Ever Lived, Katharine Smyth elegantly weaves together her thoughts on the death of her father and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” — Elle

“Calling all English majors: This is the memoir for you. Katharine Smyth manages to entangle her personal experience of grief with—wait for it—Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Smyth's memoir is an ode to both her father and her favorite writer, whose words brought her comfort and clarity in a time of loss.” — Marie Claire

“This is a memoir about how reading a book inflects your life, and how your own life inflects your reading of the novel, and your rereading of the novel… The way the book and the life intersect is really beautifully told in this memoir. Very unusual, very well-done.” – Bill Goldstein, NBC Weekend Today in New York

“All The Lives We Ever Lived is a lyrical memoir about Katharine Smyth's connection to Virginia Woolf's writing, and the power of literature in our darkest times.” — Bustle

“Smyth's writing shimmers brightly… These days, when personal grief becomes a public performance on social media, it's heartening to have a book that shows how much better it is to introspect more deeply and allow literature to be both solace and inspiration.” — Pop Matters

“Some of our most intimate relationships can be with people we’ve never met, but who have nonetheless inspired us, so much so we feel as if we know them. For first-time author Katharine Smyth, that person was Virginia Woolf…Part memoir, part literary criticism, the book examines Smyth’s own life in parallel—and contrast— to that novel’s themes.” — Town & Country

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR ALL THE LIVES WE EVER LIVED

“I loved All the Lives We Ever Lived: its structural inventiveness, its fluid and lyrically beautiful writing—some lines made me gasp—and its often astonishing wisdom. But above all, this is a smart, moving portrait of a family in crisis; Smyth weaves literary criticism and biography into nearly every page, but she never strays from the deepest concerns of the human heart.”
—Jamie Quatro, author of Fire Sermon and I Want to Show You More

“All the Lives We Ever Lived is a work of vivid intelligence—a sharp love letter to the reading and relationships that shape us, and an ingenious reply to the questions Woolf asked her readers to answer for themselves.”
—Nell Stevens, author of Bleaker House and The Victorian and the Romantic

“Modern American memoir doesn't get better—or more inventive—than this. By weaving the story of her father's death with a meditation on Virginia Woolf's great novel, Katharine Smyth has written a book that is both fiercely moving and full of bristling intelligence. All the Lives We Ever Lived isn't just a literary tour de force; it's an enlarging reminder of the evanescence of our lives. Smyth has twinned her sensibility with Woolf's to extraordinary effect. A wonderful debut.”
—Darcy Frey, author of The Last Shot

“A stunningly well-written, exquisitely intelligent, and moving book, which deepens with each turn of the screw.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of A Mother’s Tale
 
“In her brilliant debut, Katharine Smyth has done the impossible—invented a new form for the overworked genre of memoir, weaving Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse into her personal story as she absorbs the meaning of her beloved father’s long illness and early death. Her prose is luxuriant and supple, but never sentimental, and her piercing insights into the dynamics of the nuclear family often profound.”
—Michael Scammell, author of Koestler and Solzhenitsyn

“In channeling her experience of loss through her lifelong reading of Virginia Woolf, Smyth upends the rules of a genre and delivers a book at once deeply intellectual and deeply felt, heartbreaking, funny, illuminating, and truly new.” 
—Lea Carpenter, author of Eleven Days and Red, White, Blue

“Losing then finding herself in To the Lighthouse, Katharine Smyth bestows time travel between Virginia Woolf’s memory and her own, reminding us that a book can open the heart.”
—Honor Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter

“In this remarkable memoir of familial love, illness, and grief, Katharine Smyth seamlessly braids her story around that of her literary idol, Virginia Woolf, and around that writer's most enduring characters. All the Lives We Ever Lived is enlightening and absolutely original, with writing that is gentle, elegant, and true.”
—Marcia DeSanctis, author of 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go