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Blue Nights, by Joan Didion
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From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.
Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.
- Sales Rank: #157746 in eBooks
- Published on: 2011-11-01
- Released on: 2011-11-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“A haunting memoir . . . Didion is, to my mind, the best living essayist in America . . . What appears on the surface to be an elegantly, intelligently, deeply felt, precisely written story of the loss of a beloved child is actually an elegantly, intelligently, deeply felt, precisely written glimpse into the abyss, a book that forces us to understand, to admit, that there can be no preparation for tragedy, no protection from it, and so, finally, no consolation . . . The book has . . . an incantatory quality: it is a beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy, a beseeching prayer the is sung even as one knows the answer to one’s plea, and that answer is: No.”
—Cathleen Schine, The New York Review of Books
“Blue Nights, though as elegantly written as one would expect, is rawer than its predecessor, the ‘impenetrable polish’ of former, better days now chipped and scratched. The author as she presents herself here, aging and baffled, is defenseless against the pain of loss, not only the loss of loved ones but the loss that is yet to come: the loss, that is, of selfhood. The book will be another huge success . . . Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.”
—John Banville, The New York Times Book Review
"The marvel of Blue Nights is that its 76-year-old, matchstick-frail author has found the strength to articulate her deepest fears—which are fears we can all relate to."
—Heller McAlpin, The Wasthington Post
The Week magazine's 5 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2011
“The master of American prose turns her sharp eye on her own family once again in this breathtaking follow-up to The Year of Magical Thinking. With harrowing honesty and mesmerizing style, Didion chronicles the tragic death of her daughter, Quintana, interwoven with memories of their happier days together and Didion’s own meditations on aging.”
—Malcolm Jones and Lucas Wittmann, Newsweek
“A searing memoir”
—People
“Darkly riveting . . . The cumulative effect of watching her finger her recollections like beads on a rosary is unexpectedly instructive. None of us can escape death, but Blue Nights shows how Didion has, with the devastating force of her penetrating mind, learned to simply abide.”
—Louisa Kamps, Elle
“A scalpel-sharp memoir of motherhood and loss . . . Now coping with not only grief and regret but also illness and age, Didion is courageous in both her candor and artistry, ensuring that this infinitely sad yet beguiling book of distilled reflections and remembrance is graceful and illuminating in its blue musings.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
"Brilliant...Nothing Didion has written since Play It As It Lays seems to me as right and true as Blue Nights. Nothing she has written seems as purposeful and urgent to be told."
—Joe Woodward, Huffington Post
“[Didion] often finds captivating, unparalleled grooves. Her expansive thinking…is particularly striking.”
—The A. V. Club
“The reader only senses how intimately she understands her instrument. Her sentences are unquestionably taut, rhythmic and precise.”
—Time Out NY
"A searing, incisive look at grief and loss by one of the most celebrated memoirists of our time."
—Relevant Magazine
"Both Fascinating and heartbreaking."
—Marie Claire
Review
'With Blue Nights, named for the intense and portentous beauty of the dying light, Ms Didion has translated the sad hum of her thoughts onto a profound mediation on mortality. The result aches with wisdom' Economist 'Searingly honest about the extended nightmare of losing a child' Financial Times 'Memory is the subject of her latest book, Blue Nights; its power and its pain and, in Didion's recollection of her now lost motherhood and marriage, its shimmering, unreachable beauty... she shows us, without hope but finally unafraid, that all days must end' The Times 'One of the supreme observers of American life' Daily Express 'The relentless questions betray a palpable strain, Didion is aware of this- it's part of the book's point. It's searing mainly for what this venerated US writer hasn't been able to put into words' Metro 'like nothing else Didon has written... Yet how else could she write such a book, in such a moment?... Lays bare an anguish that that infects her every waking moment' New Statesman 'This is an honest and sympathetic study of bereavement, bereft of self pity, a genuine search for an answer to an imponderable question' Jeffery Taylor, Sunday Express 'a searing poignancy...there is something epic about the scale of Joan Didion's misfortune...[Blue Nights] has an indomitable quality: a steely willingness to recollect past happiness in present adversity - the deepest of all sorrows, according to Dante - which it is impossible not to admire.' Jane Shilling, Daily Telegraph
About the Author
Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California, and now lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and eight previous books of nonfiction. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published by Everyman's Library in 2006.
Most helpful customer reviews
193 of 204 people found the following review helpful.
The Hard Language of Truth
By Federico (Fred) Moramarco
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.
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
An Uneven Evensong
By Smith's Rock
At a conference I attended once, a young and fiercely idealistic CEO of a hospital stated his goal in life: "When I lay my head down for the last time, when it is my time to die, I want to be able to look back over the years and know that what I did with my life, professional and personal, changed the lives of my family and friends, and the lives of the people that came through my hospital system, in a deeply positive way". Blue Nights, Joan Didion's memoir/partial autobiography/memorial to her husband and daughter, is a sort of "Now I lay me down to sleep" narrative, delivered from the vantage point of 75 years of life on planet Earth.
Didion's life pathway has been strewn with deaths of family members (husband and daughter) and significant friends, as well as with not a few health problems of her own. There is an Arab saying "All sunshine makes a desert". There has most certainly been rain in Didion's life. A memoir such as Blue Nights offered the opportunity to see what oases of wisdom and tranquility could bloom in the desert when the water of tragedy is applied. Did Didion utilize this opportunity? Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and neurologist that survived the Holocaust, said "Who is to give light must endure burning". Blue Nights offered Didion the opportunity to share light with her readers, light emanating from the searing pain of personal loss that she suffered. Most simply put, many cultures have come up with proverbs that reduce to this: without pain, there is no wisdom. Didion details the pain that she has experienced in life in Blue Nights. Does she leverage that pain to bring her readers wisdom? Does Blue Nights give light that radiates from the intense suffering that Didion has endured? All humans eventually face death, both our own, and of those we love. When the sunshine in Didion's life was obscured by the rain storms that befell her (and befall all of us), is it clear in Blue Nights that she used those floodwaters to nurture the growth of wisdom that we readers might vicariously access? I would argue that in writing the beautiful prosody and intriguing autobiographical tale of Blue Nights....that Didion did not, or could not, answer those questions in the affirmative.
Memoirs can be read for a variety of reasons, all of which are probably legitimate. Read from the point of view of gaining an interior view of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of one of America's great writers, Blue Nights succeeds. Many psychologists and psychiatrists agree that loss of a child is the single most stressful event adults can endure, and Didion's formidable writing talents bring home such a tragedy with devastating force. Blue Nights also succeeds on the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" level. Didion does compulsive name-dropping in this book. At times, when she feels the reader might not understand the importance of the person she is has just mentioned, the story veers away from tragedy into a Wikipedia like segment on just WHY the person she is mentioning is such a luminary. Such is the case when we become thoroughly informed about the importance of an organized crime figure whose table Didion sits at. At best, such information seems like a bit of a non sequitur; at worst, blatant self-aggrandizement.
Quintana Roo, Didion's adopted daughter who died at age 39, occupies a front and center position in the book. I should mention that I have been a Joan Didion fan for 40 years. I'll also say that in Blue Nights I felt that Didion's treatment of the agony of losing a child veered into frank melodrama, and cloying sentimentalism. Didion's writing, long an example to me of startlingly insights and clear-eyed analyses of the country and culture that she has grown up in, has seemed almost absent of sentimentality and melodrama in the past. No longer is this the case. It is true that sentimentality and melodrama sell well in the entertainment world. Most would agree that neither are the hallmarks of excellence in art.
Those that enjoy highly detailed accounts of celebrity lives will be entertained by Blue Nights. Readers actively pursuing the liqueur of wisdom that can be distilled from the crazy fermentation called life are not likely to find resonance with this book. Some say that the definition of important art is that it both entertains AND informs. Blue Nights makes it halfway there.
151 of 185 people found the following review helpful.
Bad taste in mouth after reading
By B. Tracy
I have always loved Joan Didion, to the point that I thought she could do no wrong. I would await each new book with absolutely no hesitation that I might not enjoy it. The same happened when I received "Blue Nights" and I launched right into it with the comfortable knowledge that I would surely love it.
About halfway through, I realized the biggest reaction I was having to the book was annoyance. Ms. Didion, while clearly distraught by her daughter's untimely death, seems to be too self-conscious of how she herself comes across in the book, making sure to share more n enough detail about how fabulous and successful her life has been. Quintana Roo, as I fear might be the case in real life, seems to be an afterthought, someone who provides some funny quips for her mother to use in her writing. Quintana Roo seems to me like a little girl desperately wanting her parents to love her and include her, apparent in such stories like her daughter's "sundries" or her "cancer diagnosis" (chicken pox). I think theone part that confirmed for me that DIdion is no longer accessible to her readers is when she oh-so-delightfully explains how on all the trips they would take Quintana Roo on, her daughter didn't understand what it meant to be "on expenses" and "not on expenses." How dare a little girl not realize that when a big studio is picking up the tab, you can order caviar, but when your parents have to actually spend their own money, you can't spoil yourself with othe people's money? What an adorable tale to relay to the everyman reader!
Didion has lost me at this point. As another reviewer noted, I would love to know more about Quintana Roo, but maybe it's someone else's job to tell us about her, someone who won't be so self-aware of her own portrayal in the story as is clearly the case with this author.
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