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The room has its own energy the air moves more freely and breathing comes easier.
The bed is pressed up against a sea-green bookshelf; her head rested among words.
Three years ago, I spent four days living as close to that room as a civilian possibly can.
Except it wasnt my life I was living, but a cozy simulacrum of Woolfs.
It felt exhilaratingly close, but was it close enough?
Did it really help me understand?
For me, that book is [Woolfs]To the Lighthouse.
Smyths father died when she was in her early 20s.
She attended Cambridge, as Woolfs father and brothers did.
And yet, those differences only add contrast to Smyths connective tissue.
Woolf might agree with Smyth thatTo the Lighthouseis her defining work.
Its Woolfs auto-fiction, before such a term existed.
The story of the Ramsay family is told in three parts.
Friends and family pass through the house: their insights, worries, and preoccupations shifting into focus.
The shape it takes inAll The Livesis Smyths own unrelenting desire to understand her father.
Smyths beautiful debut is more tightly strung together than youd imagine a memoir-cum-literary-requiem could be.
Smyth is resurrecting Woolf through her novel finding the kinship between reader and writer that rests in storytelling.
Its fitting that Smyth both begins and ends her memoirby discussing Woolfs homes.
It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery in St. Ives.
But the reality is disappointing.
A Ford Focus was parked in the driveway.
Modernity has crashed into Smyths vision in the form of an American hybrid.
It isnt until a gardener invites her to look around back that she recognizes the house Woolf described.
On an adventure quite like Smyths, I stalked St. Ivess streets until I found Talland House.
I, too, shuddered at its current state.
Still, theres something fitting about Talland Houses lapse as a site of Woolf pilgrimage.
It became more of an idea for Woolf than a real place.
After their London flat was bombed during the blitz, the Woolfs made Monks House their full-time home.
Smyth also ends her story at Monks House.
Leonard and Virginia, she writes, are the phantom pair who haunt its halls.
Its a fruitless enterprise, of course.
Ill never know Virginia, and Smyth will never know her, either.
Perhaps the desire itself is overeager, even unsavory.
Woolf suffered horribly at Monks House, walked out its back door and into the river forever.
And yet, Woolf understood and respected that voyeurism is at the heart of literary creation.
