4 ideas
Most of daily life is 'non-being': walking, eating and ordering dinner happen in a nondescript 'cotton wool' that is lived but not consciously registered, so it leaves no memory. Embedded in it are rare 'moments of being', sudden, intense shocks of awareness that stay vivid for decades. Memory, and therefore a life story, is built almost entirely from these exceptional moments rather than from the bulk of lived time.
As a child at St Ives, Woolf fought her brother Thoby and suddenly dropped her fist, overcome by a hopeless sadness at the thought of hurting anyone. She looked at a flower bed and felt with certainty that 'that is the whole', seeing the flower as part of the earth. After overhearing that a family acquaintance, Mr Valpy, had killed himself, she walked past an apple tree in the garden at night and became paralysed with horror, as if the tree itself were connected to the death. Two of these shocks left her in despair and one left her satisfied, and she uses the three to show that such moments differ in feeling but share the same intensity.
Woolf suggests her 'shock-receiving capacity' is what makes her a writer: each blow seems a token of some real pattern behind the cotton wool, and putting it into words makes it whole, which takes away its power to hurt. Her mother, Julia Stephen, who died when Woolf was 13, obsessed her until she was 44. She conceived To the Lighthouse in a sudden rush and wrote it quickly, and afterwards she no longer heard her mother's voice or saw her, which she supposes is what psychoanalysts do for patients.
A memoir should record the 'I' who is remembering at the moment of writing as well as the remembered events, because the present moment changes what the past looks like. Woolf dates her entries and sets 1939 beside her childhood so the reader can see the two layers acting on each other. She also argues that biographies fail because they leave out the person to whom things happened and the 'invisible presences', such as family, class and society, that shaped that person.