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

by Katharine Smyth Narrated by Brittany Pressley

Overview

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

Editorial Reviews

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile

Brittany Pressley’s stunning narration captures the difficult process of a cancer diagnosis, hospice care, and, ultimately, losing a parent—all of which is heard through a loving analysis of the writing of Virginia Woolf. As a young college student, Smyth studies the works of Woolf and also comes face to face with the diagnosis of her father’s bladder cancer. Pressley steps through the words of this literary memoir with great care, providing just the right emphasis for the difficult passages about loss before powerfully delivering the elegant passages from some of Woolf’s greatest works. It can be difficult to keep tragedy and hope balanced in the delivery of a memoir, but Pressley provides the perfect blend in this performance. V.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

The New York Times Book Review - Radhika Jones

Smyth's memoir is most absorbing when it is absorbed in her own life, especially in her portrait of her father, whose alcoholism creeps deftly into the narrative…As Smyth grapples with the illness and decline of the man she had thought of as godlike, she excavates the foundation of her parents' marriage, their relationship with each other and her relationship with each of them. Her 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…[Smyth's] 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.

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/11/2019

In this luminous debut memoir, Smyth, an editor at the Paris Review, recounts her father’s life and death, while referring to Virginia Woolf and her novel To the Lighthouse as a counterpoint to her own experiences of love and family attachment. An only child born to two Boston architects, Smyth idolized her father, a self-proclaimed nihilist who is beguiling, affectionate, and self-destructive, “the cynosure of all eyes.” Diagnosed with kidney cancer at 46 when the author was 11, Geoffrey Smyth continued to smoke and drink; throughout the next 14 years his family endured his battles with bladder and lung cancers until his death. Smyth moves effortlessly through the narrative, whether detailing her father’s illness or reveling in powerful memories (making a dollhouse together; her father swimming amid jellyfish off the coast of Rhode Island). Examining her parents’ marriage, Smyth turns to Woolf’s reflections on the institution, specifically in the relationship between Woolf and her husband, Leonard: “Marriage to Leonard may at times have felt like servitude, but it could also be an overwhelming source of joy.” This is a moving and fascinating portrait of a father and his daughter’s unyielding devotion. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

"[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

"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... a consolation, a shelter and a community, an unending conversation about mortality and loss that creates unity from the fragmentation of life and death."—HuffPost

"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
 
"Smyth is an elegant writer and she explores her deep, complicated love for her father in lyrical yet restrained prose."—Literary Review (UK)

“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 review)

“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] 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

“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

“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.”—review31

“Smyth’s prose pulsates with intensity, and its lyrical qualities make [the book] 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

“Powerful . . . 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

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile

Brittany Pressley’s stunning narration captures the difficult process of a cancer diagnosis, hospice care, and, ultimately, losing a parent—all of which is heard through a loving analysis of the writing of Virginia Woolf. As a young college student, Smyth studies the works of Woolf and also comes face to face with the diagnosis of her father’s bladder cancer. Pressley steps through the words of this literary memoir with great care, providing just the right emphasis for the difficult passages about loss before powerfully delivering the elegant passages from some of Woolf’s greatest works. It can be difficult to keep tragedy and hope balanced in the delivery of a memoir, but Pressley provides the perfect blend in this performance. V.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172197819
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	01/29/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

PART ONE

1

“The house was all lit up, and the lights after the darkness made his eyes feel full, and he said to himself, childishly, as he walked up the drive, Lights, lights, lights, and repeated in a dazed way, Lights, lights, lights, as they came into the house.”

When I was five, my parents bought a summerhouse. For years we had spent our weekends sailing, driving between our home in Boston and the Rhode Island marina where we kept the boat, and for years my parents had admired the row of waterfront cottages they could see from the highway bridge. One weekend, leaving me with friends, they stopped at a local real estate agency. “The houses on the water almost never come up,” the agent said, not quite truthfully, “but one came on the market this morning.” She took them to see it, a wooden house built in 1890 and in a state of price-deflating disrepair. Sheets of plastic were stapled across its windows; to one side was a garage, to the other a desiccated lawn and concrete steps leading to the water. The small adjoining lot was full of rubble, all that remained of a shack annihilated by a hurricane fifty years before. A night nurse was the house’s current occupant, and my parents had to wait until midnight before they were shown inside. They found rooms cramped and badly lit. Dampness seeped from the basement’s earth floor. A bare wooden deck faced the water, but it too was wrapped in thick plastic. We’ll take it, my parents said, and in the morning signed the papers.

Both architects, they spent the coming months drawing up plans. They tore down walls and put up new ones; winterized the basement and made it their bedroom. A new deck ousted the living room, and the old deck became the dining room. The garage was transformed into a studio, the empty lot to the south a garden, and every wall that faced the water became a wall of windows. We devoted our weekends that winter to supervising the renovation. A beastly wind leapt off the basin, slipping through cracks and ripping at the plastic sheets that now stood in for windows altogether. The house then was a skeleton; from the water, it looked like an architectural cross section. We wore winter coats indoors. I spent my time collecting the sawdust that drifted like snow into the corners of rooms—I liked how light and downy and dry it was—and when, come spring, the house was finally finished, I mixed this sawdust with glue, molded it in the shape of a heart, and baked it in the oven.

That summer my parents planted an olive tree, a dogwood, a Japanese maple, and star magnolias. They put in rose bushes, honeysuckle, and a porcelain vine to soften the deck. They hoped a wisteria plant would gently envelop the trellis over the sunken yard; instead the vine grew freakishly, its weighty boughs promising to fell the structure altogether. My father vowed each summer to rip the wisteria out at its roots, and each summer my mother protested, citing the two glorious May weeks in which it shot forth its cloud of amethyst flowers. There were rolls of sod that steamed in the sunlight—my father carried them from the car, set them down on the soil, and gave them a push, unfurling each one like a long green carpet. For a few weeks they showed at the seams, but then the roots plaited together, and I could no longer tell where one piece stopped and the next began. Something similar happened inside, where the rooms at first were neat and spare: one day I looked around me and realized our expanding lives had filled the gaps. We learned quickly how bleached things become in a house on the water, how exhaustively salt and light leach color, leaving behind pale blues and yellows. The spines of books, the cork-tiled floors, the rugs and prints and bed linens—each became a cheerfully bloodless version of itself. Before my parents were finished they built a dock and then they put down a mooring of their own. There is a photograph of the three of us posing beside this hunk of chain and metal; it was the last time we would see it before sending it down to the bottom of the sea, to settle in the mud and provide a stay against the tides to come.

The next summer—I must have been about seven—my father and I built a doll’s house. It was a pretty Victorian home with two bay windows, a wraparound verandah, and scalloped trim along the eaves, and it demanded many months of work; I can still recall the care with which we affixed each individual baluster and shingle, the tackiness of the glue we used to wallpaper the rooms. We painted the woodwork in colors reminiscent of our Boston home: dark green, slate blue, taupe, and russet red. In another photograph from that time, the half-finished doll’s house sits at the end of the dining table; through curtainless windows, you can see the lights on the far shore double in the water’s surface. My father is consumed by the application of some fixture or other, and I, wearing a flannel, rose-print nightgown, hair matted, am standing on a chair and supervising. I loved playing with that house when it was finally finished; and yet the greatest pleasure of all was in its construction, in the evenings that my father and I passed together in nearly wordless concentration.

The divide between week and weekend was extreme then, and when I considered the difference, I thought of something he had told me when we were sailing, as our boat, Mistral, was heeling and the wind filling our throats. In Boston our lungs were black and horrible, he said, but in Rhode Island they were lovely and shiny and pink. It was an image I held on to as I went about my days—days that I filled with pointed yet purposeless tasks (paddling to nearby sand dunes; watering the rock wall moss), much as a cat will suddenly decide that now is the moment she must leap from the window and dash to the couch.

The specter of boredom gave rise to ingenuity, I think, which is how I came to clomp down the beach in my roller skates, and make the acquaintance of a horse-shaped boulder I named Star, and build a nest beneath the billiard table, and run barefoot up and down the street; by mid-July, I could stick sewing needles deep into my heels without sensation. I loved beachcombing best, though—every day I spent hours wandering the rocky strand at the foot of the seawall, collecting sea glass, broken bits of blue-and-white china, lady’s slippers, conch shells, the forsaken skeletons of horseshoe crabs, and, once, a rusty key chain from the Stone Bridge Inn, a hotel a mile down the road that had shuttered twenty-five years earlier. When I’d gathered enough shells, my father took me to the hardware store to buy a diamond drill bit—the only tool strong enough, he said, to bore into the lady’s slippers and make a necklace for my mother. It was years before I noticed the peculiar quality of light the days here possessed, how on afternoons and evenings the house would flood with lemon heat, or how the reflection of the water outside, at once blue and gold and glittering, would throw itself against the ceiling, transforming the rooms into a string of tide pools. But from the very beginning, I felt that light within my lungs.

“if life has a base that it stands upon,” Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Sketch of the Past,” her longest and most abundant memoir, “if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. . . . ​It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.” This brilliant, sea-filled nursery belonged to Talland House, the nineteenth-century home in Cornwall where Virginia, her parents, and her seven siblings spent every summer until she was thirteen. She called this recollection “the most important of all my memories,” and, much like the schism between my own childhood weeks and weekends, its radiance was in sharp contrast to her impressions of her family’s London home, a dim, narrow, six-story townhouse in Kensington where “busts shrined in crimson velvet, enriched the gloom of a room naturally dark and thickly shaded,” and where, in the words of her sister Vanessa, “faces loomed out of the surrounding shade like Rembrandt portraits.”

Talland House—its light, its cresting water—would be consecrated in Virginia’s imagination, saturating not only To the Lighthouse but also Jacob’s Room and The Waves. “To go sailing in a fishing boat,” she waxed in her late fifties, “to scrabble over the rocks and see the red and yellow anemones flourishing their antennae; or stuck like blobs of jelly to the rock; to find a small fish flapping in a pool; to pick up cowries; to look over the grammar in the dining room and see the lights changing on the bay. . . . ​All together made the summer at St Ives the best beginning to life conceivable.” The tumbling passage conveys the lasting vigor of these memories; as Hermione Lee notes in her terrific biography of Woolf, Talland House “is where she sites, for the whole of her life, the idea of happiness. . . . ​Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house.”

When Virginia’s mother died of rheumatic fever in 1895, the Stephens’ visits to Talland House abruptly ceased. “Father instantly decided that he wished never to see St Ives again,” she recalled. “And perhaps a month later Gerald [Duckworth, Virginia’s half brother] went down alone; settled the sale of our lease to some people called Millie Dow, and St Ives vanished for ever.” Some thirty years later, this sudden, devastating break—the actual and figurative end to Virginia’s childhood—would become the inspiration for To the Lighthouse, in which she transposed Cornwall’s Talland House, seemingly in its entirety, to the Hebrides, a cluster of islands off the coast of Scotland to which she had never been. (“An old creature writes to say that all my fauna and flora of the Hebrides is totally inaccurate,” she wrote to Vita, and to Vanessa: “there are no rooks, elms, or dahlias in the Hebrides; my sparrows are wrong; so are my carnations.”) This house and its story are, quite literally, at the novel’s center, as vital to it as the Ramsays and their friends; which is why, during a trip to England to celebrate my grandmother’s ninety-ninth birthday, I made a St Ives pilgrimage: I wanted to see what the Cornish landscape might teach me, not just about To the Lighthouse and its author but also about those homes by which we measure happiness.

It was a clear afternoon in June when I boarded the train in my grandmother’s village; sipping wine, passing through Tiverton—the namesake of our Rhode Island town—I was feeling as dreamy as Virginia about the coming journey. “This time tomorrow,” she wrote in 1921, “we shall be stepping onto the platform at Penzance, sniffing the air, looking for our trap, & then—Good God!—driving off across the moors to Zennor—Why am I so incredibly & incurably romantic about Cornwall?” My train pulled in at half past eight, but the sun was still high above the houses, and I thought I could see through the gaps in the buildings the white stripe of Godrevy Lighthouse. Then, suddenly, I turned a bend and St Ives Bay unveiled itself, the same view, more or less, that causes Mrs. Ramsay to stop short, exclaiming aloud at its beauty. “For the great plateful of blue water was before her,” we first hear of the novel’s beacon, “the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them.” I had read those words a hundred times, and the image they had always conjured was of a seascape much nearer and brighter than this one; for here the lighthouse stood no taller than a matchstick upon its little pile of black rock, and I had to squint to see the thin green lines of land.

But I liked this readjustment of my vision; in fact it was an enlargement, the gentle pop of a jigsaw puzzle fitting together; and then again when I took a wrong turn after dinner and the cobblestone path curved round and up to reveal a vast sandy beach, with regular waves coiling and crashing in rows of four. The last bit of light shone through between the clouds, and the water beat against the sand—I would hear it all night through my bedroom window—and I knew then what Virginia meant when she wrote, addressing Cornwall’s pull for her, of “old waves that have been breaking precisely so these thousand years,” and when she wrote, in her original notes for To the Lighthouse, that “the sea is to be heard all through it.” As much as anywhere I’ve ever been, the sea is the lifeblood of St Ives.

The following morning, I made my way to Talland House. I didn’t have a house number, so I relied on Woolf to help me find it. “A square house,” she said, “like a child’s drawing of a house; remarkable only for its flat roof, and the crisscrossed railing.” When, at the end of a cul-de-sac, it finally materialized, I felt a stab of disappointment. Its ivory walls were streaked with rust, and a tangle of exterior metal staircases, providing access to second- and third-floor flats, crept up the rear. A Ford Focus was parked in the driveway. I was still debating my approach when a beefy young man in blue sweatpants walked out with a Rottweiler—the epitome of a Virginia Woolf fan, in other words. “Yeah?” he asked, suspicious.

“I’m just looking at the house,” I said. “You know Virginia Woolf lived here?”

“Yeah?”

“Is it okay if I look around?”

“Yeah,” he said again, gesturing toward a snarl of vegetation. “There’s a lawn round back if you like.”

I thanked him, wondering how many seekers had appeared at his door, then plunged into the upper garden. I knew the grounds were greatly changed; much of the land had been sold off, and a parking lot replaced the orchard. But I could still see what Leslie Stephen had meant by “a garden of an acre or two all up and down hill, with quaint little terraces divided by hedges of escallonia.”

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