There are rust-coloured stains on page six of my library copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. It is here that Didion is describing cleaning up the blood, the spilt blood from her husband’s moments of death. It is unnerving, the mark of ink and blood on the soiled page. I can see the carpet, the discarded syringes, and I can already feel the force of Didion’s eye on this page, this moment, this ordinary instant, this instant. Didion’s book is an attempt to navigate grief and life itself, through the analysis of text and images, of words and markings on a page. She writes ‘even as a child...I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs…’ We traverse a year which transports her from her literal, fixed, understood world, across the shifting plates of a new landscape. ‘Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?’ she asks. She takes us from the domestic scenes, detailed with chairs, bo