Katharine Smyth

For other people with similar names, see Katherine Smith (disambiguation).

Katharine Smyth is an American memoirist, most known for writing All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, a memoir about her father's death as well as literary criticism of Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse.

Early life and education

Smyth grew up in Boston and Rhode Island. She attended the Park School, graduating in 1996. Her mother, Minty, was Australian, and her father, Geoffrey, was an English architect and a co-founder of the architecture magazine Clip-Kit.

Geoffrey was diagnosed with kidney cancer when Katharine was a child, and later, when she was in graduate school in 2007, he died at age 59 of cancer as well as complications from alcoholism.

Smyth graduated from Brown University, and also studied abroad at Oxford. After college, she worked at an art gallery, and then at the Paris Review. She later earned an MFA in non-fiction from Columbia University.

Career

Her memoir, All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, was released in 2019 to mostly positive reviews. Bethanne Patrick, writing for TIME, said, "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." Francesca Wade, writing for Prospect, noted the book's "raw and moving prose" and called it "painful to read, but not banal," as well as "elegant and powerful." Morten Høi Jensen, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote, "In the end, the most revelatory thing about All the Lives We Ever Lived is its absence of revelation. Nothing stands still, nothing is permanent. There are just the little odds and ends to lay hold of, some sight, some sound. It is enough."

Smyth is currently based in Montana, where she writes original works for the Montana InSite Theatere.

Personal life

Smyth once was married, but then divorced.