To each his own

My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Scott was born in 1766, grew on the Virginia and Carolina frontiers, at age sixteen married an eighteen-year-old veteran of the Revolution and the Cherokee expeditions named Benjamin Hardin IV, moved with him into Tennessee and Kentucky and died on still another frontier, the Oil Trough Bottom on the south bank of the White River in what is now Arkansas but was then Missouri Territory.

That is the first sentence in Joan Didion’s book Where I Was From. Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist, often credited as being one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe. Although her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking is widely considered the classic book on mourning and won a National Book Award for Nonfiction, I didn’t much like it. I do, however, enjoy reading about California so here I sit with her again.

This is a beautifully crafted sentence, grammatically correct, visual and informative. However, you won’t find sentences like it in my personal or ghost writing. I believe it’s too much work for the reader to understand. And now I am going to take a nap, one I deserve after dissecting it!