'Gillian Leahy’s 1986 film, My Life Without Steve, is a story of solitude, pain and obsession, of raw emotions elegantly presented and endlessly interrogated. It begins with an exterior perspective, an image of sunlight on water. The camera moves slowly and gracefully from outside to inside; thereafter, the film is essentially an interior vision of some kind: a first-person narrative, an anguished, irritable, unsparing, self-centring contemplation.' (Introduction)