Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer Book

I picked this up on a whim in the bargain bin at Politics and Prose; I was having a bad day and feeling sorry for myself, and here is the first sentence on the jacket: "By the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as 'sledge-hammer blows'" -- and I had gasped and taken it to the cashier and walked it home before reading the rest of the sentence: "beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her half-sister, father and brother." Woolf puts my grief in perspective, always.

This is a book by a psychologist analyzing the writings in Woolf's diaries and tracing how she became a writer. There are chapters on The Writer at 22 and then at 23 and 24 and 25, and I am at that age where the gradation between those moments feels immense.

Also, a perfect Pale King companion piece for this: "Astonishingly gifted from the start, Woolf learned to be attentive to the movements of her own mind."