Joan Didion begins “Blue Nights,” her first book since 2005’s National Book Award-winning memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking,” with an explanation of the “blue nights” phenomenon. These are evenings in which, in “certain latitudes” following the summer solstice, the twilights “turn long and blue.” It’s a seductive metaphor for where Didion, 76, now finds herself: exploring her life and the looming prospect of death, having lost her husband of nearly 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003, and her only child, daughter Quintana Roo, just over a year after that.
But the first chapter of “Blue Nights” is also somewhat of a disclaimer. This book should not be thought of as simply a follow-up to “Magical Thinking,” but as a standalone work. It is more a study of what it means to be a parent and a person; more immediate than “Magical Thinking,” it also, by nature, feels less complete.
Quintana Roo, the “beautiful baby girl” Didion and Dunne adopted in 1966, soon after they had settled down in Los Angeles, died of acute pancreatitis in April 2005, after being struck by a series of illnesses beginning almost two years earlier. There are more details about these events — what Didion calls Quintana’s “revised circumstances” — in “Magical Thinking” than are found here, but there is the same searing examination of the medical process in both books. Didion, who touches on some of her own medical issues here as well, shows us how the distance between doctor and patient, and those representing the patient, is incontrovertibly too great to cross, no matter how good we might be at playing the “attentive student,” as she describes herself, no matter how “up on the vernacular” we are.
The act of replaying is something Didion has discussed in relation to “The Year of Magical Thinking.” The “magical thinking” was just that — going through the events again in writing in hopes of arriving at a happier outcome. But here, there is less delving into such details, and more acceptance, though it may at times be flippant. And how can it not be? Didion shares the conflicting readings of an aneurysm she has: One doctor says it “doesn’t look ready to blow.” Another says, “If it does blow, you won’t live through it.”
“This seemed to be offered as encouraging news,” she writes, “and I accepted it as such.” Her fear now is not of death, but of not dying — of “damaging” a vital organ like her brain, then continuing to live.
Didion is a master of the nonfiction form partly because she weaves such dispersive topics into a single narrative: Here, as in her previous book, she brings in a host of other writers’ observations about death, news stories and even the slightest of episodes from her life before and after Quintana’s birth. Even Quintana’s name is the result of curiosity and well-honed observation. Didion writes that Quintana was named after the Mexican state, which until some time after Quintana’s birth had been, as child rearing was for Didion, “terra incognita” — just an unspoiled place with a beautiful name.
“The only reader I hear is me,” Didion told the Paris Review in a 1977 interview. “I am always writing to myself.” That these missives then be released into the world may be the most challenging part in the process. “Blue Nights” seems to dogleg abruptly into silence, but fittingly so. The book is an exercise, as “Magical Thinking” was an exercise (“a search for my own sanity,” Didion has called it). It is a reminder that such an exercise, a letter to the self, does not have to mean slapdash or unconsidered, but the very opposite.
But the first chapter of “Blue Nights” is also somewhat of a disclaimer. This book should not be thought of as simply a follow-up to “Magical Thinking,” but as a standalone work. It is more a study of what it means to be a parent and a person; more immediate than “Magical Thinking,” it also, by nature, feels less complete.
Quintana Roo, the “beautiful baby girl” Didion and Dunne adopted in 1966, soon after they had settled down in Los Angeles, died of acute pancreatitis in April 2005, after being struck by a series of illnesses beginning almost two years earlier. There are more details about these events — what Didion calls Quintana’s “revised circumstances” — in “Magical Thinking” than are found here, but there is the same searing examination of the medical process in both books. Didion, who touches on some of her own medical issues here as well, shows us how the distance between doctor and patient, and those representing the patient, is incontrovertibly too great to cross, no matter how good we might be at playing the “attentive student,” as she describes herself, no matter how “up on the vernacular” we are.
The act of replaying is something Didion has discussed in relation to “The Year of Magical Thinking.” The “magical thinking” was just that — going through the events again in writing in hopes of arriving at a happier outcome. But here, there is less delving into such details, and more acceptance, though it may at times be flippant. And how can it not be? Didion shares the conflicting readings of an aneurysm she has: One doctor says it “doesn’t look ready to blow.” Another says, “If it does blow, you won’t live through it.”
“This seemed to be offered as encouraging news,” she writes, “and I accepted it as such.” Her fear now is not of death, but of not dying — of “damaging” a vital organ like her brain, then continuing to live.
Didion is a master of the nonfiction form partly because she weaves such dispersive topics into a single narrative: Here, as in her previous book, she brings in a host of other writers’ observations about death, news stories and even the slightest of episodes from her life before and after Quintana’s birth. Even Quintana’s name is the result of curiosity and well-honed observation. Didion writes that Quintana was named after the Mexican state, which until some time after Quintana’s birth had been, as child rearing was for Didion, “terra incognita” — just an unspoiled place with a beautiful name.
“The only reader I hear is me,” Didion told the Paris Review in a 1977 interview. “I am always writing to myself.” That these missives then be released into the world may be the most challenging part in the process. “Blue Nights” seems to dogleg abruptly into silence, but fittingly so. The book is an exercise, as “Magical Thinking” was an exercise (“a search for my own sanity,” Didion has called it). It is a reminder that such an exercise, a letter to the self, does not have to mean slapdash or unconsidered, but the very opposite.
