Clare Duffy's Quitting is an intimate study of the lingering pain of a relationship's breakdown and the undertow of longing that keeps the one left behind tethered to the person who ended it. Composer Richard Clements first heard Clare read the piece on the Tenx9 podcast, drawn to its prose-poetry feel and to what he calls "a beautiful rawness in Clare's delivery of a relationship that had fragmented beyond repair."

Set to a rhythmic piano piece by Clements, Clare's spoken words sound over footage from UTV's archive and various amateur films edited by the DFA's own Paul McClintock. Clements' score layers pianos and music boxes with stone scratching noises to create a darker ambience. Clements' aim is to "allow the music and spoken word to breathe in a new form."

Images of young women at dancehalls, working, socialising and modelling at fashion shows give the story a visual life beyond its narrator. They lend Duffy's deeply personal account "a wider connection and relevance across decades." These archive faces, caught in ordinary moments, quietly widen one woman's account of heartbreak into something far more familiar, the small details becoming universally understood.

• Richard Clements
• StoryMakers Chapter 2