In the Key of Life

I’ve just started Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

I’d not read any of her writing before but had been primed to expect a writing style “as clean and precise as a steel blade”. Having read 60 odd pages, that description certainly feels fair. I’d been recommended this particular book because of the subject it deals with. Grief. I’m trying to understand it better and trying to find ways of seeing the issue from a different perspective. Immediately, Didion’s writing has offered fresh insight into what grief is like for people losing a partner and how this emotion and experience is different to that of losing a parent.

I’ve put marks and asterisks and squiggles and lines against a number of passages within the book already, but one in particular jumped out at me. I read it several times on the tube between Euston and London Bridge yesterday morning and I’ve struggled to forget it.

“I remember combining the cash that had been in his pocket with the cash in my own bag, smoothing the bills, taking special care to interleaf twenties with twenties, tens with tens, fives and ones with fives and ones. I remember thinking as I did this he would see that I was handling things"

The advice contained in Several Short Sentences About Writing is still lingering. It’s helped me better identify writing that has rhythm, pace and vitality. Writing that uses punctuation to it’s advantage. Didion’s switch to " fives and one with fives and ones” after matching denominations directly created a change in pace right at the end of the sentence which was incredibly affecting and effective. There is not an ounce of fat in her prose, yet she manages to keep the words dancing on the page. They are full of energy, life. Light and shade.