All the Lives We Ever Lived

Posted on 24 December 2018 by Katharine Smyth

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 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. Download All the Lives We Ever Lived Author Katharine Smyth – kino-fada.fr All The Lives We Ever Lived Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf 2019 is written by Katharine Smyth, and is an articulate exploration of literary criticism combined with a deeply personal memoir and tribute to the life and death of her beloved father who passed away from cancer and alcohol related conditions Smyth is a graduate from Brown University, with a MFA in nonfiction.While studying at Oxford and visiting her gra...This book is a memoir both of the author s experience of her father s death and her reading of Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse Smyth is a skillful writer and her accounting of her father s illness and death brought me to tears, large due to its power in reminding me of my own mother s death many years ago Her musings on the nature of death were both affecting and interesting.But for me the greatest value in this book is its use of Woolf s book to illuminate the author s experience and her u This book is a memoir both of the author s experience of her father s death and her reading of Virginia Woolf s T... I closed my eyes and tried to sleep I opened them and asked my seatmate for the time We were still hours away, and I willed the seconds to pass, even as I had an image then of the death moment as a fracture that had split my life in two, and every minute, every mile, was a measure of the growing distance between me and the part of life I much preferred Some ten years later, I m still on that train.The writing in this book is almost too good In All the Lives We Ever Lived, Katharine Smyth int I closed my eyes and tried to sleep I opened them...All the Lives We Ever Lived is an evocative portrait of the deep bond between the author and her dynamic, difficult father It is an exploration of her overwhelming grief at his death In her struggle to communicate the complexity of that experience, Smyth turns to Virginia Woolf, to the book that has long been her lodestar at life s most difficult moments To the Lighthouse Smyth draws comparisons between her relationships and those of the characters in Woolf s masterwork She admires how Wool All the Lives We Ever Lived is an evocative portrait of the deep bond between the author and her dynamic, difficult father It is an exploration of her overwhelming grief at his death In her struggle to communicate the complexity of that experience, Smyth turns to Virginia Woolf, to the book that has long been her lodestar at life s most difficult moments To the Lighthouse Smyth draws comparisons between her relationships and those of the characters in Woolf s masterwork She admires how Woolf grapples with the deepest, most fundamental human questions ...I won this book as a giveaway It s an alright read It s a memoir where the author compares her life to Virginia Woolf life as well as her Lighthouse novel The author clearly shows comparisons and the ...Oh my goodness I picked this book up because i was caught with nothing to occupy my time at a Library volunteer function I was hooked after three pages Perhaps it hit me a little harder because my father passed in October The author was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouseand, after her father who was her favorite parent, maybe her favorite pe...It s a very well written and personal meditation on grief though the lens of Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse A detailed knowledge of that book would add value to the reading experience.Love the analysis of Woolf The end of the book suffered from what the author herself pointed out as the simple inability to come to a truth about the reality process of mourning But rather than acknowledge a...How does one even go about rating and reviewing the memoirs of another Something I had never previously had occasion to ask myself What I will say is that I appreciate the author making To the Lighthouse and Virginia Woolf accessible I had tried to read Lighthouse previously, because it is such a classic, and I would have felt remiss if I did not, but the writing style of Woolf, with the endless commas, sentences which stretch on forever, I think called stream of consciousness, sentences whic How does one even go about rating and reviewing the memoirs of another Something I had ne...A powerful, emotional, moving memoir by Katharine Smyth.All The Lives We Ever Lived takes place in an English Class where Katharine Smyth first came across To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolfs.After her father s death she returned to seek solice and comfort in that novel.Readers are taken on a memorable journey between her childhood memories and Virginia Woolfs Bloomsbury Squares.Comfort reading at its finest in seeking answers and solutions to family loss, heartache...

English
24 December 2018

Katharine Smyth