1. Regarding the historical circumstances of publication: How does the fact that Woolf’s Moments of Being was published posthumously impact the narrative? How does her utter and perhaps unusual transparency of her intended audience and her writing process affect the power of her work across time?

2. Regarding Woolf’s self-conscious style of memoir writing: Woolf acknowledged in “A Sketch of the Past” that memoir writers must make certain decision that are “more artistically convenient” when portraying past events and interpersonal interactions (64). In what ways does this acknowledgment impact the experience of reading her highly sensual and visual descriptions of her nursery and the road to the beach that follow almost immediately after? Are her choices to commit so much lyrical energy to the various settings of her childhood and young adulthood counter to her own conviction that “so many memoirs” fail because “[t]hey leave out the person to whom things happened” (65)?

3. Regarding different intended audiences: Woolf wrote “Reminiscences” around 1907 for Julian, her sister Vanessa’s son; she wrote “A Sketch of the Past” during the rise of the Second World War to divert herself from her fiction writing (and, presumably, from the war, which she referenced several times in her text). Each narrative paints a different picture of her childhood and her siblings. Though similar qualities of her siblings are mentioned in each – such as Vanessa’s bearing the brunt of their father’s emotions – she described these things differently in the different narratives. What are the implications here for contemporary life writing, which often exists in a largely instantaneous form and amorphous audience (blogging, for example)? Do life narratives become stronger, weaker, or some amalgam of the two when the intended audience narrows or broadens?

4. Regarding gender and sexuality: In what ways did Woolf push the envelope of which aspects of gender expression and sexuality were discussed in memoir writing? She referred to her and Vanessa’s being “tomboys” and sexual ambivalence towards men was lightly veiled. (For example, her passages about Stella and Vanessa’s beauty were immensely more sensual than her rather clinical appraisals of George’s handsomeness.) In “22 Hyde Park,” she also referenced George’s abuse of she and Vanessa, but she did so in a subtle manner that might find itself out of place in many contemporary expository memoirs. Where do Woolf’s narratives fit into contemporary memoirs of queer sexualities and of sexual abuse?

5. Regarding writing memoirs on command: Woolf expressly stated in the beginning of both “Old Bloomsbury” and “Am I a Snob?” that Molly (from the Memoir Club) requested the narratives she was about to create. To assist her in the former piece, Woolf examined and quoted from an old diary of hers. Were there other qualitative differences between these pieces and the pieces Woolf wrote without external prompting? Does receiving and fulfilling a request to write something fundamentally change the nature of the memoir?

Fun Finish: Woolf breathed a great deal of life into the locations she described. Of her old house, she said: “the bedroom – the double bedded bedroom on the first floor – was the sexual centre; the birth centre; the death centre of the house. It was not a large room; but its walls must be soaked, if walls take pictures and hoard up what is done and said with all that was most intense, of all that makes the most private being, of family life” (118). There is a film called If These Walls Could Talk 2 that chronicles the imagined stories of the lives of various people who live in one house over many decades. (There is apparently an If These Walls Could Talk 1, and though I’ve never seen it, Cher is apparently in it and it deals with abortion.) From elderly women lovers who cannot reveal the nature of their love to family members, even and especially after one of them has died; to young college women in the 60s trying to combine lesbianism and feminism, and learning about the validity of butch and femme identities in the process; to a lesbian couple (Ellen DeGeneres is involved here) having a baby, the film takes whomever lived in the house and puts their stories on screen. The film is pretty white and creates a fictional notion that now, everything is perfect for everyone because lesbians can have babies, but despite those things, it’s an amazing concept, very gay, and fits with what Virginia Woolf imagined of the walls of that bedroom soaking up everything that happens inside! (Caution: the first part of the movie might make you cry a lot, though. If you’re me, the second part will make you cry, too. But you’re not me, so it might not. Hope you enjoy if you get to see it!)