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I went to see Barbara Loden’s Wanda at a screening at the ICA, not for Nathalie Léger, but for Don DeLillo I was finishing my PhD on his work and editing a book about him; at that point I was drawn to all things DeLillo, and wanted to see a film that I had read he admired After reading him on Wanda, I imagined him sitting in the same dark room, watching with me DeLillo’s appreciation for the film’s qualities meant that I came to it through him — the master of seeing, for whom, as he writes in his story ‘The Starveling’, ‘all human existence is a trick of the light’   His ‘trick of the light’ takes on new resonances when considered in relation to the unique power of cinematic seeing As we watch Wanda walk across a quarry in one of the first few scenes of the film, alone in the landscape around her, DeLillo sees the whole film in an instant: ‘the chalky figure in the distance will appear in powerful close-up at the end of the film, face and heart revealed’ But I would disagree with DeLillo about our proximity to our protagonist: at the close of the film Wanda does not open out to us, but seems more inaccessible than ever Though film allows for the lives of characters to be rendered in transformative visual metaphors (Wanda dwarfed by her landscape; Wanda engulfed by the frame), the ‘trick’ for me is the inexactness of what these moments depict No image can ever communicate the totality of a life   The French writer Nathalie Léger has her own tricks for giving lives new shape and depth, which play out in her informal trilogy about three women artists: the Countess de Castiglione, Barbara Loden and Pippa Bacca Léger views these women through the intimate lens of her own family and her own writing process, only to zoom out, to place them in their contexts: their time, their history, or their discipline Her paragraphs shift between these positions, as if viewing her