Blue Nights: A Memoir

I've been reading Joan Didion's work for nearly half a century--I got hooked by her early collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and have read every thing she's written since. For years I began my Contemporary American Literature class at San Diego State University with the famous first sentence from her collection, The White Album: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." I used that as a keynote to the course because I wanted students to understand that stories are not merely entertainment (although they can be that) but life essentials. Without them life as we know it would be impossible. Ask anyone a basic question: "Where are you from?" "What school did you go to? What do you do for a living? And so on, and he or she will tell you a story. We use stories to link together the disconnected moments of our lives, or as Didion so cogently puts it in "The White Album," "We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the `ideas' with which se have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." "Shifting phantasmagoria"--that's how we perceive our lives-- just one thing after another. And sometimes those kaleidoscopic images can shift from bright dazzling colors to dark opaque hues with just a single twist of the lens. This is of course what happened to Didion. As everyone knows, in the last several years she has suffered mightily. Her stunning, heartbreaking book, The Year of Magical Thinking, which told the story of her husband John Gregory Dunne's sudden, unexpected death, haunts the memory and takes us inside a deep, unsettling grief that turned her life upside down. Blue Nights is in a sense a sequel to that book, as grief piled upon grief and less than two year's after her husband's death, she lost her daughter, Quintana Roo, , who had been seriously ill since even before her father's death. Blue Nights tells the story of that second loss, and conveys the incomparable anguish a parent feels upon losing a child. But it also goes beyond that to become a meditation on the inevitability of death, and both the frailty and surprise of old age. This latter part of Blue Nights, which explores Didion's newly-bestowed identity as an ailing, anxious, lonely, disconnected, forgetful old woman is especially hypnotic reading. As Gertrude told Hamlet, " `tis common; all that lives must die/Passing through nature to eternity." This universally common reality is the story that Didion tells in the last and strongest section of this book. All of her yearning for the presence of her daughter while extremely moving, echoes much of the longing she experienced for her husband's presence in The Year of Magical Thinking. But here she takes us even more deeply inside her anxieties and vulnerabilities. She worries about losing her ability to write, to move about, to walk without pain, to remember things. She acknowledges the strange heightened sense of accelerating time that is peculiar to old age. Read this remarkable passage, which anyone older than 70 will surely relate to--but because many readers will be much younger than that, it will give them an inkling of what's coming. "Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than a small child...has just described them as `wrinkly,' or asked how old they are. When we are asked this question we are always undone by iots innocence, somehow whammed by the clear bell-like tones in which it is asked. What shames us is this: the answer we give is never innocent. The answer we give is unclear, evasive, even guilty. Right now when I answer this question I find myself doubting my own accuracy, rechecking the increasingly undoable arithmetic (born December 5 1934, subtract 1934 from 2009, do this in your head and watch yourself get muddled by the interruption of the entirely irrelevant millennium), insisting to myself (no one else particularly cares) that there must be a mistake: only yesterday I was in my fifties, by forties, only yesterday I was thirty-one." It's hard to stop quoting from Didion as she connects dots. She was thirty-one when Quintana was born...and that of course was only yesterday as well, and then all the yesterdays come tumbling down, all her "what-ifs," all her nostalgic memories of her early life in LA when they called freeways by names instead of numbers, when she "could still do arithmetic, remember telephone numbers, rent a car at the airport and drive it out of the lot without freezing, stopping at the key moment, feet already on the pedals but immobilized by the question of which is the accelerator and which is the brake." This is unsparingly honest and brave writing about the kind of thing old people usually go out of their way to cover up. How honest it is is revealed in the final two sentences which contrasts what she tells the rental car attendant with what she tells the reader. Here is absolute honesty about the ongoing dishonesty of us who have entered our seventies:"I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car."I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give." When you have the kind of long-term life relationship with a writer that I have with Joan Didion you feel that you know him or her personally. Although I have never actually met her, it feels like I'm reading about my own family--my own life. Don't be put off by the grimness of the subject matter; this book is a treasure.

I am a fan of Joan Didion. I fist for an audiobook of her The Year of Magical Thinking. It was a rough book she had to write and like through. She loved her husband and they were fighting and living through their daughter's bad health time. Then she lost him. He had bad health that took him away without living through his daughter's battle.Then Joan was alone mostly. She, her daughter's husband, and daughter had to survive the passing of her husband. Then Joan, Quintana and her husband thought they had survived the months of Quintana's hospital stays. They then found it was not over.This book not only explains the trial by facts, but it also shows the battle of mental health of all that 2000s. This before Obama was president. This before a lot of the world's changed.I miss her deeply. I don't know all of it, but I loved the Netflix documentary movie about her. It was done by a nephew she got by her marriage.I recommend the audiobook and book. Just be prepared for a battle with your mental health. I am too going through a hospital life. Joan didn't have MS, but that may be a battle for me.

When I read The Year of Magical Thinking several years ago, my father had died only weeks before, and I found it to be the most soothing and immeasurably helpful study on the unfamiliar process of grief. This book is it's companion piece, picking up where the author ended her previous book, not yet able to begin to truly grieve for her daughter.On it's face, this book a personal account of processing the loss of a child. But it's greater import is it's consideration of the journey we all face. We live, and then we do not; but in between we slowly lose everything that is comfortable and familiar. The clothes worn in our cherished photographs are gone and forgotten. Old family homes get torn down and familiar skylines are unrecognizably altered. And the people we love most disappear. Inevitably, undeniably our world changes around us, but perhaps most frightening of all is we are destined to deteriorate along with it.Ms. Didion immerses the reader in her reflections of the past, her regrets and partial remembrances. In the context of her daughter's death (which is too vaguely explained, I think) this book at times is a painful read. That said, she is such a fine writer, her prose so elegant, I think it was well worth it.For those reviewers who did not care for this book because they felt it too name-dropish, like a laundry list of privilege, I respectfully disagree. Ms. Didion paints a picture of her world in the 60's and 70's, and that world included designer linen dresses and lunch with the glitterati in Manhattan. The description of these events becomes poignant when contrasted with the Ms. Didion of today, frail and alone, abandoned in an apartment whose drawers she cannot open for fear of seeing yet another reminder of a past she can never recapture.Not an uplifting read by any means, this book is painful and poignant, and a worthwhile read.

Didion is. not afraid to speak a truth, to try and put understanding to the emotions and confusion that death brings

One feels. She's allowed.

Não é tão bom quanto 'The year of magical thinking' mas vale a pena.

Joan Didion is a wonderful writer. In this book she writes about the death of her daughter.

Just love the writing and the expression of sorrow and the sense of ending that comes with losing someone you love!