The flight to Sydney lasted only five minutes because I was reading Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur. When her husband comes back after the war I cried so much my face twitched, I had to wipe my eyes on my skirt. ‘I remember the sobbing all through the house, the tenants lingering on the stairs, the doors standing open.’ Her writing is so physical. The movement of her sentences captures the movement of emotion and thought—it’s real women’s writing, shameless but never sloppy. Maybe she’s what I’m looking for—to show me how to control emotion without being false to its power, how to be absent and fully present at once.