That Year of Magical Thinking

I finished Joan Didion's memoir last night/this morning.

She has some profound comments on grief, although they may only be profound to people who are language-louche, or who try to figure things out.

One passage pins it down quite well, beginning with the sentence, "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it," and ends with the following:

Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

And Joan Didion is a writer.

After her husband's death, she reports, she wrote a piece about politics, the first piece (of nonfiction specifically?) she'd written since 1963 "that he did not read in draft form and tell me what was wrong, what was needed, how to bring it up here, take it down there. . . . I realized at some point I was unwilling to finish it, because there was no one to read it."