All the Lives We Ever Lived

Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf

By: Katharine Smyth

Narrated by: Brittany Pressley

Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

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)

©2019 Katharine Smyth (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"[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, New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice)

"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." (Washington Post)

"Brilliant...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." (Vulture)

Processing grief though literature

As I am presently revisiting “To the Lighthouse” and Virginia Woolf this book grabbed my attention. I found the author’s story interweaved with Woolf’s to be a fascinating and realistic way to deal with the death of the most important person in your life. This is my second reading of “To the Lighthouse” and I will have a much deeper and layered appreciation for what Virginia Woolf was able to capture in her novel. Without some connection to the novel, I don’t think a reader will find this book as compelling as I did.

Mixed review.

A story of life and loss. Boring at times. Depressing most of the time. However, there are also several golden nuggets of soulful insight for marriage, relationship conflict, and grieving a death. Narrator did a great job.

the cross between the storyline

to understand Virginia Wolfe is here in the cross between the author life and the light house by Virginia Wolfe

Surprised I Finished This

This book was too long...the same thing kept being said over and over. The description of her father's death was stretched out to include every minute detail...unnecessary and hard to listen to. If this book had been shortened by 50%, it would have improved the book's concept by 100%. Having said that, the narration by Pressley was excellent, and perhaps the only reason I got through this arduous read.