This paper addresses Woolf’s praxis of autobiography in Moments of Being through a mirror effect that is rarely considered in the studies of Life Narratives, the writer as critic of her own text. Woolf knows that autobiography, more than fiction, relies on conventions that need to be followed for the referential pact to be concluded successfully. The texts seem to be addressed to a specific addressee, as is right and proper, and the author answers the implied reader’s supposed demand for truth. However, the reader figure that Woolf creates is also partly made in her own image: she appears as an expert in literature, something which guides both the writing of her text and the reception of it. The reader that emerges from these autobiographical fragments is no common reader, but a critic that influences the writer as much as s/he is shaped by her.