Woman tries to understand late father

There is a truism in the publishing business that memoirs don’t sell unless the author is famous or has undergone truly terrible experiences.

But there are some memoirs that reach right out and capture us, even if we have never heard of the author. Such is the case with Katharine Smyth’s extraordinary debut, “All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf.”

Smyth sets out to understand the irascible spirit of her architect father, who died after a long, grim fight with cancer and alcoholism. In the midst of her grief, she turns to Virginia Woolf, an author who famously grappled with the premature deaths of family members in her writing. Smyth’s fascination with Woolf enriches her own writing, providing her with the wisdom she needs to make sense of her loss. The result is a memoir enlarged and illuminated by Woolf ’s insights, but mediated by Smyth’s trenchant observations and wit.

Smyth’s story is funny and filled with life, in part because her father was passionately dedicated to filling their time together with beauty, humor and projects.

And yet, Smyth’s father had a dark side. His alcoholism brutalized the family. He threw things. He raged. He had tantrums. He could be cruel to Smyth’s mother, and sometimes so enmired in his own misery that he seemed “pathetic” to the teenage Smyth.

After he was diagnosed with cancer, he could not stop smoking or drinking, though his life, literally, depended on it. He said he didn’t care if he lived or died, unmoved by the impact this would have on his only daughter, who desperately wanted him to live.

Driven to understand who he really was, Smyth goes on a quest to uncover his past. What was he like before he married Smyth’s mother? Who was he before he was her father? Smyth interviews friends from the past, even old girlfriends. Then, just as we think she has succeeded in capturing him, she learns a secret that overturns all she thought she knew, and all we thought we knew. It turns out, she reflects, that there is a limit to how well we can know those we love.

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.