Activity

[...] Didion uses ironic, or what could be more accurately called skeptical, quotation marks fanatically and constantly. They highlight the fact that the journalist is not just telling a story, she is taking it apart; that the words we use are suspect, revelatory.

She did clipped irony and she did sentences swelling with portent.

The usual elisions occur

Joan Didion, for all her stylistic brio, becomes straightforward