Blue Nights picks up pretty much where The Year of Magical Thinking leaves off. When The Year of Magical Thinking was published, Joan Didion’s daughter had passed away, but she had not written about it in the book. The book dealt, instead, with the loss of her husband who died of a heart attack in 2004. In the documentary about Didion, The Center Will Not Hold, Didion talks about this book. About how she didn’t want to write it. She did so because she was urged to while working on the stage play of The Year of Magical Thinking. She was told that people would have questions about her daughter’s death after she shared so much about her husband’s.
I can understand her desire not to write this particular story. The loss of a partner is, based on her account, impossible to get over. The loss of a child, on the other hand, is just impossible. (You might notice that the cover for The Year of Magical Thinking highlights letters to spell out her husband’s name – John. This one highlights simply the word NO.) To delve into that impossible event, to explore the emotions that accompany it, to remember all those precious moments of a child’s life – so unimportant at the time, but that you would now give anything to re-live – is such a painful prospect as to be one very few people can face.
Didion is not one to flinch from a reporting challenge. Whether it’s reporting on a murderer, a coup, a drug-addled five-year-old or the loss of her husband of nearly four decades, she has stepped up to the plate and delivered. This one, however, no one would have faulted her for refusing to face.
Where The Year of Magical Thinking felt distanced, this book felt almost too close. Her pain is evident in every phrase, every word. Her guilt at having failed to protect the child placed in her care as a baby is palpable. The void left behind by Quintana’s death is felt on every page. How do you survive such a loss? How do you continue to move forward? She discusses this, how it was a conscious effort simply to maintain momentum. To get up in the morning, eat, go about the tasks of her day.
She explores some of the themes she began to touch on in The Year of Magical Thinking. The faultline John’s death opened in the centre of her perception of the world and of her place in it. Where before she had moved through the world with an assumption of safety and health, she can now no longer do so. Now she is aware of her own frailty, of her age, of the delicacy of being human. At seventy-five (when this was written), she was facing her own medical issues while writing this book, and questioning whether her reaction to these is adequate. Whether she can continue to live on her own, or even trust that she can step out of a cab or stand from a chair reliably.
I felt such an emotional reaction to this book. I’m not as old as she is, but due to my own medical issues, I’m seeing some of the same signs of impending corporeal failure she is. I’m facing some of the same fears about what will happen to me if my body ceases to sustain its vital functions at an inconvenient time – going down the stairs or crossing a street, say. I live with the awareness that my life could end at any time, and I no longer have the luxury of assuming that just because today is a day on which I can breathe and walk, that tomorrow will be. I understand those fears. I have the further fear of leaving behind a daughter still young enough to need me – she has the opposite problem. Her daughter is gone, and she can’t do anything to change that. She is now facing all her fears alone, and all she wants is for Quintana to be there with her.
I can’t imagine losing my daughter. No, that’s not entirely accurate. I imagine it all the time. I see danger everywhere, and every time she falls ill I’m terrified of how sick she may become. But even with all that fear, my imagination cannot assimilate what the reality of losing her would be. It’s so far out of what I could deal with that my brain cannot linger there. Like trying to imagine how big the ever-expanding universe is, imagining a world without my daughter is impossible. And if that were to happen, could I go on? Could I get up in the morning? Could I eat? Could I bring myself to put that pain on paper? I don’t think so. So I don’t know how Didion managed to do so.
This book is one everyone reaching or moving past middle age should read. Or whose parents are growing old. I will stop short of saying you should read it if you have lost a child. That is a case in which you should not read it. It holds too much of that loss.
I nearly didn’t read this, having just finished her previous memoir. I’m so glad I did. Once again, it’s not perfect. It still has her trademark odd sentence structure that I often find irritating. It still has a lot of repetition. It still doesn’t adequately address her privilege (she mentions it in this book in relation to her daughter’s childhood, but summarily dismisses it as irrelevant because every child raised in the same part of Los Angeles had a Spanish-speaking servant and a swimming pool and attended private school). No, it’s not perfect. But, as before, I didn’t need it to be. It is still incredibly powerful, and I am in awe of her courage in writing it. If you enjoy Didion’s writing or read The Year of Magical Thinking and wondered what came next, this book is a must-read. If you are only going to read one of her books, based on the three I’ve read, I’d vote to make it this one.
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. – Goodreads
Book Title: Blue Nights
Author: Joan Didion
Series: No
Edition: Paperback
Published By: Knopf
Released: November 1, 2011
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Family, Motherhood, Aging, Grief
Pages: 208
Date Read: November 18-December 1, 2019
Rating: 8/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.81/5 (22,610 ratings)
I’ve heard about these books and Didion, but I’ve never read her books.