All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf

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 livesâ€”and see clearly the people we love most.

â€œTranscendent.â€â€”The Washington PostÂ â€¢ â€œYouâ€™d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolfâ€™s work.â€Â â€”TheÂ Wall Street Journal

Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolfâ€™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 deathâ€”a calamity that claimed her favorite personâ€”she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief.

Smythâ€™s story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolfâ€™s Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss, and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading ofÂ To the Lighthouse, and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolfâ€™s most demanding and rewarding novelâ€”and crafts an elegant reminder of literatureâ€™s ability to clarify and console.
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Braiding memoir, literary criticism, and biography, All the Lives We Ever LivedÂ 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

â€œThis searching memoir pays homage toÂ To the Lighthouse, while recounting the authorâ€™s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer. . . .Â Smythâ€™s writing is evocative and incisive.â€â€”The New Yorker

â€œLikeÂ H Is for Hawk, Smythâ€™s book is a memoir thatâ€™s not quite a memoir, using Woolf, and her obsession with Woolf, as a springboard to tell the story of her fatherâ€™s vivid life and sad demise due to alcoholism and cancer. .Â . . An experiment in twenty-first century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh.â€â€”Vogue

â€œDeeply moving â€“ part memoir, part literary criticism, part outpouring of longing and griefâ€¦ This is a beautiful book about the wildness of mortalÂ life, and the tenuous consolations of art.â€â€”The Times Literary Supplement

â€œBlending 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.â€â€”Time
Country USA
Brand CROWN
Manufacturer Crown
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber Illustrations, unspecified
ReleaseDate 2019-01-29
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781524760625

Country	USA
Brand	CROWN
Manufacturer	Crown
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	Illustrations, unspecified
ReleaseDate	2019-01-29
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781524760625

All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf

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