Blue Nights (Didion)

Blue Nights
Joan Didion, 2012
Knopf Doubleday
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307387387


Summary
From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter.

Richly textured with memories from her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion is an intensely personal and moving account of her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness and growing old.

As she reflects on her daughter’s life and on her role as a parent, Didion grapples with the candid questions that all parents face, and contemplates her 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 profound. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 5, 1934
• Where—Sacramento, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California at Berkeley
• Awards—National Book Award, 2005
• Currently—New York, New York


For over forty years, Joan Didion has been widely renowned as one of the strongest, wittiest, and most-acerbic voices in journalism, literature, and film. With such fierce works as Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Salvador, and The White Album, she exposed shifting cultural and political climates with humor and unflinching clarity. In classic novels such as A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, and The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion further explored American culture and politics through the veil of fiction.

Together with her husband John Gregory Dunne, she co-wrote films like The Panic in Needle Park and Play It As It Lays. Firmly established as a heavy hitter in the field of sober political criticism, contemporary literature, and cutting humor, no one could have been more unnerved by Didion's psychological unraveling in the wake of a pair of tragedies than Didion herself — a fact she conveys in her brilliant, shattering latest work.

The Year of Magical Thinking chronicles an exceptionally unforgiving period in Didion's life. Her recently married daughter Quintana had been stricken with pneumonia and fell into a coma. Only a week later, her husband and partner of 40-years died of a heart attack. Battered by these events, Didion felt her grip on reality suddenly slipping, expecting her husband to return home at any moment. "Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it," Didion later told New York magazine, "which was the interesting aspect of it to me — how really tenuous our sanity is."

As a means of dealing with her intense grief, Didion found herself unconsciously composing the book that would help her work through the pain of losing a husband while watching a daughter slowly fade away. As she told Barnes & Noble.com...

When I began doing it, I was just writing down notes on what the doctors had said, and their telephone numbers, and their recommendations for other specialists, and then I realized that I was writing other stuff down too — and then I thought, well, I'll just write it all down, and then I realized I was thinking about how to structure it, which was kind of a clue that I was writing something.

What she was writing was The Year of Magical Thinking. She explained to New York magazine that she structured her book so that it served as a parallel to the grieving process, "the way in which you obsessively go over the same scenes again and again and again trying to make them end differently." The book ultimately fuses her finely crafted, sardonic prose with a story more personal than any she had ever told before. As Robert Pinsky of the New York Times Book Review wrote, "As in Didion's previous writing, her sense of timing, sentence by sentence and in the arrangement of scenes, draws the reader forward. Her manner is deadpan funny, slicing away banality with an air that is ruthless yet meticulous." Pinsky is not alone in his praise of Didion's latest; The Year of Magical Thinking has also received well-deserved raves from publications such as the Washington Post and Library Journal.

Most important of all is the role the book has played in Didion's own recovery from her disastrous year. "It became very useful to me," she says, "useful in terms of processing and trying to figure out what had happened."

Blue Nights about the death of her daughter...and her own impending demise was published in 2012. Kirkus Reviews called it "a slim, somber classic."

Extras
From a 2006 Barnes & Noble interview:

• "My first (and only, ever) job was at Vogue. I learned a great deal there—I learned how to use words economically (because I was writing to space), I learned how to very quickly take in enough information about an entirely foreign subject to produce a few paragraphs that at least sounded authoritative.

• "I would like my readers to know that writing never gets any easier. You don't gain confidence. You are always flying blind."

• Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, co-wrote seven screenplays, including: The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Play It As It Lays (1973), A Star Is Born (1977), True Confessions (1982), Hills Like White Elephants (1990), Broken Trust (1995) and Up Close and Personal (1995).

• She is the sister-in-law of author Dominick Dunne and the aunt of actor/director Griffin Dunne.

• When asked about which book influenced her most as a writer, here is her response:

It's hard to limit this to one book, but the book from which I learned the most as a writer was Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. I taught myself to type by tying out passages from a lot of Hemingway, but that book especially—it taught me the importance of absolute precision, of how every word and every comma and every absence of a word or comma can change the meaning, make the rhythm, make the difference.

(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Review
Exemplary...provocative.... [Didion] 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 - New York Times Book Review
 

Profoundly moving.... This is first and last a meditation on mortality.
San Francisco Chronicle


Ms. Didion has created something luminous amid her self-recrimination and sorrow. It’s her final gift to her daughter—one that only she could give.
Wall Street Journal


A beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy.... 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.
New York Review of Books
 

Ms. Didion has translated the sad hum of her thoughts into a profound meditation on mortality. The result aches with a wisdom that feels dreadfully earned.
Economist
 

For the great many of us who cherish Joan Didion, who can never get enough of her voice and her brilliant, fragile, endearing, pitiless persona, [Blue Nights] is a gift.
Newsday
 

Exquisite.... She applies the same rigorous standards of research and meticulous observation to her own life that she expects from herself in journalism. And to get down to the art of what she does, her sense of form is as sharp as a glass-cutter’s, and her sentences fold back on themselves and come out singing in a way that other writers can only wonder at and envy.
Washington Independent Review of Books
 
 
Yes, this is a book about aging and about loss. Mostly, though, it is about what one parent and child shared—and what all parents and children share, the intimacy of what bring you closer and what splits you apart.
Oprah.com
 

Breathtaking.... 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.
Newsweek
 

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.
Elle
 

In this supremely tender work of memory, Didion is paradoxically insistent that as long as one person is condemned to remember, there can still be pain and loss and anguish.
Christopher Hitchens - Vanity Fair


Loss has pursued author Didion relentlessly, and in this subtly crushing memoir about the untimely death of her daughter, Quintana Roo (1966–2005), coming on the heels of The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicled the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion again turns face forward to the harsh truth. “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children,” she writes, groping her way backward through painful memories of Quintana Roo’s life, from her recent marriage in 2003 to adorable moments of childhood moving about California in the 1970s with her worldly parents and learning early on cues about how to grow up fast. While her parents were writing books, working on location for movies, and staying in fancy hotels, Quintana Roo developed “depths and shallows,” as her mother depicts in her elliptically dark fashion, later diagnosed as “borderline personality disorder”; while Didion does not specify what exactly caused Quintana’s repeated hospitalizations and coma at the end of her life, the author seems to suggest it was a kind of death wish, about which Didion feels guilt, not having heeded the signs early enough. Her own health—she writes at age 75—is increasingly frail, and she is obsessed with falling down and being an invalid. Yet Didion continually demonstrates her keen survival instincts, and her writing is, as ever, truculent and mesmerizing, scrutinizing herself as mercilessly as she stares down death.
Publishers Weekly


In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion wrote about her reaction to the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Here she addresses the death shortly thereafter of her 39-year-old daughter, Quintana, who died of complications from pneumonia. Adopted at birth and apprised of this at a young age, Quintana had feelings of abandonment her entire life. Didion wonders here whether her handling of her daughter's early years contributed to those feelings and generally questions her suitability as a parent. At the same time, she discusses her own attempts to cope with aging and the onset of frailty. Didion's spare style of writing gets right to the point. She ponders Quintana's utterances and writings to try to better understand her and how she herself might have responded differently, but ultimately, there are no answers. Verdict: This worthwhile meditation on parenting and aging by a succinct writer, while at times difficult to read and a bit self-centered, is well worth the emotional toll. —Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences Lib., Philadelphia
Library Journal


Didion’s bravest work. It is a bittersweet look back at what she’s lost, and an unflinching assessment of what she has left.
BookPage


Didion delivers a second masterpiece on grief, considering both her daughter's death and her inevitable own.... Like Magical Thinking, this book is constructed out of close studies of particular memories and bits of medical lingo. Didion tests Quintana's childhood poems and scribblings for hints of her own failings as a mother, and she voices her helplessness at the hands of doctors.... Didion's clipped, recursive sentences initially make the book feel arid and emotionally distant. But she's profoundly aware of tone and style...and the chapters become increasingly freighted with sorrow without displaying sentimentality.... A slim, somber classic.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Blue Nights is a deeply elegiac, heartrending book. What are some of its most emotionally powerful moments? What makes these moments so moving?

2. Didion’s style in Blue Nights is clipped, austere, emotionally restrained. What is the effect of the short sentences, short chapters, and paragraphs that often consist of a single sentence? In what ways is Didion’s tone and style appropriate to her subject?

3. A number of italicized statements recur throughout Blue Nights, consisting most often of things that Quintana said—“Let me just be in the ground”; “Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it”; “After I became five, I never ever dreamed about him.” What is the emotional effect of these repetitions? Why would Didion keep repeating these lines?

4. Didion writes: “My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether. Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp. The tone needs to be direct. I need to talk to you directly, I need to address the subject as it were, but something stops me.... Am I no longer able to talk directly?” [p. 116]. Is the tone of Blue Nights direct or indirect? Why might Didion find it difficult to be as direct as she wants to be about her subject?

5. Didion quotes Euripides: “What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead” [p. 13]. In what ways does Blue Nights bear out this truth? Of all the griefs that humans might be forced to endure why is this the most painful?

6. What kind of child was Quintana? What was most remarkable about her and most painful about her loss?

7. Thinking back to Quintana’s wedding, Didion writes: “I still see from that wedding day at St. John the Divine: the bright red soles on her shoes. She was wearing Christian Louboutin shoes, pale satin with bright red soles. You saw the red soles when she kneeled at the altar” [p. 69]. What is the effect, on Didion and on the reader, of these minute but vividly remembered details? What other details seem especially poignant?

8. Didion says she knows very few people who think of themselves as having succeeded as parents, that most parents instead “recite rosaries of failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies” [p. 93]. What does Didion most regret about her relationship with Quintana? What does she see as her failures?

9. Why might Quintana have seen her mother as “frail,” as needing her care, rather than the reverse? [p. 101].

10. Didion says that she had initially wanted to write a book about children but that after she started it became clear her true subject was “the failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death” [p. 54]. What does the book say about these essential human themes? Does Didion fail to confront them?

11. Blue Nights is filled with digressions—about movie shoots, changes in parenting styles over the past fifty years, her own work in the theatre, Sophia Loren, etc.—but keeps circling back to the death of her daughter and to her own illness and aging. Why might Didion have chosen this kind of structure, rather than a more straightforward chronological approach?

12. Didion describes her own illnesses and medical emergencies in a remarkably matter-of-fact way. Why is this understated approach more powerful than a more dramatic rendering might be?

13. What is so powerful about Didion’s quandary over who to list as an emergency contact on a medical form? What reveries does this question lead to?

14. Why does Didion end the book with a series of single, short sentences? Does she achieve here the kind of emotional directness she earlier felt was beyond her?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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