“I fart into the cushion without shifting my bottom. I must look like hell but I don’t care. All I care about is my next cigarette.” When quantity surveyor and builder Janita Sakoschek’s house burnt down it unleashed a catastrophic chain of events. She lost everything: her paintings, her diaries and photographs, and ultimately, her sanity. Now she sits rooted to a borrowed sofa, chain-smoking, and blackly depressed. When she finally agrees to see a psychologist, she is institutionalised immediately. As she threads in episodes from her past and present life we soon realise that a breakdown has been a long time coming. In Ladybird Janita poignantly records her riotous experiences with counsellors and characters of all kinds: from psychiatric doctors and patients in Johannesburg to a retired Legionnaire in the South of France. We trace her deepening spirituality as she embarks on her most challenging construction job yet: rebuilding the walls of her collapsed life.