A searing, incisive look at grief and loss by one of the most celebrated memoirists of our time.
Celebrated writer Joan Didion has seen some amazing and dreadful things in her half-century-long career. However, in her new memoir, Blue Nights, she shares that dealing with the death of her daughter and confronting her own mortality evokes a dread—and awe—greater than any she has encountered.
Didion earned her place in the canon of great American writers by immersing herself in some of the most horrifying aspects of the human condition and sending calm, clear-eyed dispatches back to her readers on the homefront. As a journalist and essayist, she has reported on topics as diverse as the Revolutionary Government Junta of El Salvador, to the debauched hippies of the Haight-Asbury, the Los Angeles riots and the spectacle of political party conventions—all the while retaining a clipped, almost cold peacefulness in the face of overwhelming anxiety and dread. Even her most recent bestseller, 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking, considered the death of her husband with the thorough research and collected distance of a woman well-versed in the mores of magazine journalism.
However, in Blue Nights, all calmness has left Didion’s voice. “This book is called Blue Nights because at the time I found myself turning increasingly to illness,” she explains matter-of-factly in the first chapter, “to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness.” Didion’s narrative explodes into a near-hysterical exploration of the life and early demise of her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, phasing back and forth from the present moment to points throughout their life together to illustrate the terrible mysteries that continue to haunt Didion years after Dunne’s death. The tone is one of stunning, almost overwhelming grief—a literary keening, both for the loss of Didion’s own daughter and for the further losses that Didion sees looming before her. As a result, the sadness intrinsic to the story is heightened to almost frightening levels, the literary voice most known for quiet observation suddenly turning into a wail of grief.
“When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children,” Didion writes, and indeed much of Blue Nights is about the anxieties of raising a child even in the best circumstances. As a highly successful author, she was able to provide her daughter with an astonishingly worldly life that resulted in Quintana demonstrating “dizzying alternations of infancy and sophistication” from an early age. Didion—a Californian through and through—is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that her success made her or her family’s life any better or easier. “’Privilege’ remains an area to which … I will not easily cop,” she stridently insists. However, Didion is almost excessively casual in describing the extensive travels, lavish wardrobes and celebrity friends that surrounded her family throughout Dunne’s short life, meticulously listing the designers and shops she favors for her clothing and giving off-hand mentions of Patti Smith performing at Dunne’s funeral. It serves as evidence that privilege permeated the Didion-Dunne family’s experience so thoroughly, so profoundly, that it was rendered invisible to them.
Even with such a luxe life, though, the family could not escape death, forcing Didion to face the inevitable. “As the pages progressed,” she explains of writing Blue Nights, “it occurred to me that their actual subject was … this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death.” Indeed, beyond mentions of struggles with anxiety and migraines, Didion’s work has never before collided with the realities of getting old or dying with the brutal frankness of Blue Nights. Recollections of Dunne’s time in hospitals intersect with Didion’s accounts of her own recent health scares to illustrate her increasing sense of demoralization, both with the promise of medicine and with the prospect that, regardless of any interventions, life will still end. “I know what it is I am now experiencing,” she states. “I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost … the fear is for what is still to be lost.”
Blue Nights is a deeply depressing, profoundly unsettling read. In the hands of a less capable author, it would simply be too heavy to recommend without also including a prescription for Prozac. However, Didion, with her well-honed skill and precision as a writer, turns the depression into something so immense, so pervasive, that it becomes breathtaking and even awe-inspiring. “Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness,” she explains in the introduction, “but they are also its waning.” Didion may see her career and life, to be waning; even so, Blue Nights demonstrates that as a writer she has lost none of her brightness.
Nick Mattos is a columnist and freelance writer living in Portland, Oregon.
