Grief, grammar, and the Didion sentence: Rereading The Year of Magical Thinking

For me, few books confront grief with the unflinching clarity of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. It is one of my favourite of Didion books and I reread it recently. 

Didion wrote it in the aftermath of her husband’s sudden death; it isn’t a memoir of healing so much as a dissection of loss, precise, restrained, devastating. 

Joan Didion and the art of emotional precision: What writers can learn from her style

Joan Didion never wasted a word. Her prose was as spare as it was surgical. It was a style that she forged as a journalist and later honed in her essays and fiction that cut to the heart of American life. For writers and readers alike, there's so much to learn from her technique, especially in a cultural moment saturated with overstatement and noise. If there was one takeaway from Didion’s writing, it’s that less is more.