Blue Nights is a haunting memoir about the death of Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, at the age of thirty-nine...is something quite different. Blue Nights describes Didion’s descent into the inevitability of living in a world not only without her husband, not only without her daughter, but, finally, without hope ...about what happens when there are no more stories we can tell ourselves, no narrative to guide us and make sense out of the chaos, no order, no meaning, no conclusion to the tale ...a beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy, a beseeching prayer that is sung even as one knows the answer to one’s plea, and that answer is: No ... Memories — even these memories, the ones she has collected in this book — are as fragile and complicated and beautiful...a deeply moving elegy to that void.
Blue Nights is a devastating companion volume to Magical Thinking, a beautiful condolence note to humanity about some of the painful realities of the human condition that deserves to be printed on traditional black-bordered mourning stationery ...she summons her signature spare, plainspoken prose and assertive two- or three-word paragraphs to powerful effect ...also relies, sometimes to a fault, on an almost incantatory use of structural repetition... As if shuffling the clues for a fresh take on the insoluble riddle of how Quintana’s story might have had a different ending, she returns repeatedly to the same few scenes from her daughter’s unusual childhood ... Didion’s main subject, however, is not the tragedy of Quintana’s curtailed life, but of Didion’s current sorry state. Her self-portrait is unsparing ... The marvel of Blue Nights is that its 76-year-old, matchstick-frail author has found the strength to articulate her deepest fears.
In her new book, Blue Nights, the 76-year-old author has pieced together literary snapshots, and retrieved memories about her daughter's life and death ... Her prose, in the past, just gleamed — terse, elegant, understated and piercing. The new book is what's left, after loss ... Most of Didion's books contain little mantras — quick phrases, repeated here and there throughout the text ... In Blue Nights, Didion writes that in theory, these mementos should bring back the moment, but in fact, they only make clear how inadequately she appreciated the moment back when it happened ... It's a way to get through harrowing times and unimaginable losses.
There and in Blue Nights, its companion, the rhythm, with its two or three one-line paragraphs coming at the end of a longer paragraph, its dates, its italicised tags, its almost liturgical repetitions, can feel like a snare, something one can’t escape from, a spell, a seduction. You think you are writing your own sentences: you find you are imitating hers ... Blue Nights, a more anxious, self-questioning book than The Year of Magical Thinking, is about fear, Didion’s and Quintana’s principally: fear of being abandoned, of time passing, of losing control, of dying... Towards the end, as Quintana fades out of the picture Didion writes about herself as she is now: frail, uncertain, unsteady, childless; afraid to get up from a folding chair; afraid to admit she might not know how to start a strange car; afraid that she is no longer able to tell a story.
Parents much less smart and worldly than Didion and Dunne might have struggled to find suitable responses to all this, and her new memoir, Blue Nights, doesn't reveal what theirs were. The events are presented here as evidence of Quintana's specialness and fragility ... [Didion] has always been the toughest of writers, and it would be good to believe she's being equally tough on herself ...this new book reads like a coda to the first one. Stories of Didion's grief, her husband's death, her daughter's illness, their lives together, are told again. The pain remains ... Blue Nights, of course, is profoundly moving: How could a memoir about the death of a daughter not be? However, Didion is not only concerned with the loss of a spouse and child but also about the loss of everything. This is first and last a meditation on mortality.
It may be impolitic to say so, but what readers learn about Joan Didion in Blue Nights is that she is remote even in grief, and consumed with high-end brand names ... Didion's only child, Quintana Roo, 39, died after a long hospitalization. Blue Nights covers the aftermath. Yet it tells us little about the daughter, and much about Didion and her fame-filled milieu ...reads like a barely inhabited fragment ...we dwell with Didion, her angst and her stylish life. It's hard to trust a facade ... In Blue Nights, the writer bristles at the word 'privileged' being used to describe her family. But among all her status bread crumbs, it is difficult to find Didion, and worse, difficult to care.
The new book, no less than its predecessor, is honest, unflinching, necessarily solipsistic and, in the way of these things, self-lacerating: Did she do her duty by her daughter, did she nurture her, protect her, care for her, as a mother should? Did she, in a word, love her enough? … 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, for reasons not mistaken but insufficient. 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.
Ms. Didion’s heartbreaking new book, Blue Nights, is at once a loving portrait of Quintana and a mother’s conflicted effort to grapple with her grief through words: the medium the author has used throughout her life to try to make sense of the senseless. It is a searing inquiry into loss and a melancholy meditation on mortality and time … In these pages the reader can feel Ms. Didion circling her subject, searching for a way to write about what turned out to be the worst fulfillment of the worst fears she’d harbored from the instant she became a mother: a fear of ‘swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet,’ a fear of ‘rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides, strangers who appeared at the door, unexplained fevers, elevators without operators and empty hotel corridors’ — in short, a fear of the perils of ordinary life that could threaten her daughter.
This is a very odd book, full of fury and fragility and yet somehow anaemic. In fact, Didion's heartfelt declaration that "there is no day in her life on which I do not see her" serves only to remind you of Quintana's essential absence. Because we, the readers, do not ever really "see" this girl. Even the passages where she might have come to life are rendered needlessly brittle by Didion's stabbing, birdlike prose with its constant repetitions and exhortations … Where the book is most successful – and most poignant – is in the viciously honest picture Didion draws of a lonely, encroaching old age.
There are lots of memoirs about starting over after tragedy, about overcoming grief and forging a new life. This is not one of those memoirs. Blue Nights is about loss, in all its forms ... Turning her investigative journalist’s eye inward, Didion’s ability to scrutinize her own consciousness to chronicle that raw time spoke directly to thousands of people reeling from loss ... Frailty is a theme running throughout Blue Nights ... In Blue Nights, her aim is a poignant variant. She wanted to prove 'that my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.' Not by a long shot.
On the surface, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights is a memoir about her daughter’s death. But in contemplating the life of Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, Didion travels a more harrowing path than simply charting her grief ...about love and commitment and parenthood that are often suppressed in mixed company are pecked at until all that remains of the carcass is an eye-to-eye socket look at the End ...at times an uncomfortable read, in part for the direct way Didion dissects some of our dishonesty about joy and life. There are flashes of Didion’s life here that aren’t particularly relatable ... The subsequent direction of Blue Nights is far from linear, with Didion circling themes ... In Magical Thinking, Didion’s grief ran concurrently with the task of caring for Quintana, whose health took a terrible turn. There is no such balance in Blue Nights, which settles into a twitchy solitude.
Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, which was partly occasioned by the death of her adopted daughter, Quintana, is not really a grief memoir, as it has been received. It is, more properly, a regret memoir ... It is written by an author with no hope of recovery, who has let go of her magical thinking ...evokes regret with all the acute gloominess, unapologetic directness, and occasionally milky vision that characterize the late works of great writers ... What we find off-stage is a messy jumble of reality, and a troubled uncertainty about whether her habit of 'imposing' narrative lines on events got in the way of her ability to see Quintana as the child she actually was ...is looser and less polished than most of Didion’s work ... In Blue Nights a powerful case is made that writing of regret cannot ever be a perfect performance. It cannot gesture toward redemption, or undo what has been done.
Now, from the same store of still raw memories, this time with her daughter at center stage, Didion has fashioned an equally compelling meditation on parental love, loss, memory and the perils of old age ...Didion’s narrative circles backward and forward through time, almost defying any attempt to construct a coherent chronology. Perhaps that’s a reflection of the fragmentary pieces of memory she’s trying to reassemble, and a concession to the challenge of stitching together the multiple threads of this short, but complex, book ...is Didion’s exploration of the blessings and burdens of parenthood ...she is perhaps most effective in describing her own attempt to grapple with the countless deprivations of aging... hallmarks of her inimitable prose style are here: spare, precise diction, incantatory repetition, elliptical passages and persistent questions ...this eloquent, sorrowful memoir, she bears witness to that most unspeakable of losses.
...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 ... The author also ponders her own mortality, and she does so with heartbreaking specificity ... Didion’s clipped, recursive sentences initially make the book feel arid and emotionally distant. But she’s profoundly aware of tone and style — a digression about novel-writing reveals her deep concern for the music sentences make — and the chapters become increasingly freighted with sorrow without displaying sentimentality ... feels like an epitaph for both her daughter and herself, as she considers how much aging has demolished her preconceptions about growing old.
Loss has pursued author Didion relentlessly, and in this subtly crushing memoir about the untimely death of her daughter, Quintana Roo...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 ... 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 ...he 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.
