Customer Reviews

Blue Nights

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Joan Didion's slim memoir "Blue Nights" is mostly about the life and death of her daughter Quintana Roo in 2005, at the age of 39. Quintana's death came after a year and a half of failing health and was preceded by the death of Joan's husband and Quintana's father, John Gregory Dunne, in late 2003. Didion wrote a previous memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking" about Dunne's sudden death.

As a mother myself, I cannot think of anything worse than a child's death. Nothing. So when writing my review of Joan Didion's book about her adoption, raising, and death of her child, I want to be gentle. The truth as I see it is that perhaps Didion and Dunne ought not have adopted a child. Not all people should be parents; it is one of the toughest thing you can do in life and your thoughts and considerations have to naturally be towards the welfare of the child. Didion mentions that modern parents seem to "helicopter" their children, i.e. micro-manage their lives as the grow up and I wonder if she writes that because she and Dunne seemed to do the opposite and Quintana was fit into their lives as writers and celebrities. There is, of course, a happy medium between "helicoptering" and being fairly lax in child-raising, and I think most of us do try to stay to that medium.

Quintana was adopted at birth in 1966 and given the name of "Quintana Roo", after the area of Mexico that Joan and John loved. That name, that ridiculous name, was probably the worst thing that Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne did to their child. She accompanied them as they lived their lives and they loved her. They didn't always seem to understand her; she was a child, after all, and they gave her what they could of themselves. She grew up, and displayed emotional problems and was given different diagnoses by different doctors as the recognition and lingo of mental disorders changed. Bi-polar, they were told.

Didion also writes about Quintana's reaction to being adopted. Adopted children worry about being given way by their adoptive parents as they were by their birth parents. This is a natural worry and Didion and Dunne tried to deal with it. Then, in her late 20's, Quintana was contacted by her birth sister and "reunited" with that family. It didn't work well and Quintana backed off from those new relationships. Poor Quintana had a life privileged with money, reflected fame, and love, but it didn't seem enough. She died and she left her mother - Joan Didion - alone. And Didion was herself growing older and was becoming enfeebled by age. She's now 75 years old, a famous author, and she's trying to make sense of her mothering and of her daughter's life. Joan Didion and Quintana Roo Dunne deserved to grow old together. Quintana, who married a year or so before her death, deserved a happy life. Was it her parents' fault she didn't have one? There are no guarantees in child-raising and Didion and Dunne did the best they could within their own limitations.

As usual, Joan Didion writes beautifully. I think this book may raise some of the same questions in other readers that I asked myself when reading it. A book that makes you think is always a good thing.

"Blue Nights" both begins and ends in colour, when the days shorten and 'twilights turn long and blue.' Such blue light becomes Joan Didion's vehicle to articulate the intense beauty and pain that accompany awareness of imminent loss.

This slim memoir deals with the unimaginable: the death of one's child. Didion speaks with devastating accuracy here and beautifully intertwines shards of the past. She addresses grief by continually circling back to the time before its advent, spiralling through memory trying to salvage what remains. But Didion finds no coherence among her memories; instead, she heartbreakingly offers an integrity that resists resolution.

Rather unfortunately, though, "Blue Nights" has a jumbled quality, with memories of Quintana giving way to those of film shoots, room service and news reports about abduction. In this way, the structure mirrors Didion's secondary and almost intrusive theme: the disorienting effects of aging. As the narrative develops, the author becomes increasingly explicit about the fact that the blue light, which warns of "the dying of the brightness," is signalling to her. She worries about "[her] new inability to summon the right word, the apt thought, the connection that enables the words to make sense, the rhythm, the music itself."

She needn't worry yet. Cognitive frailty may befall her someday but, for now, she remains an extraordinarily talented wordsmith, "sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell [her] what it was [she] was saying."

I tried to give this book zero stars. I am an avid reader with a broad range of interests. i truly enjoyed Didion's "Year of Magical Thinking." The best phrase I can use for Blue Nights is "pure dribble." Page after page of meandering details and thoughts about who she knows and where she goes. Who cares Joan.

Ms. Didion has truly lived through tragedy. And she is still living her life... and writing. Admirable. I hoped from such tragedy would come many insights and observations that may help others in similar circumstances. It didn't.

I looked forward to giving Blue Nights to my mother-in-law for Christmas. We would then discuss it. I couldn't lend my name to such a book. So I gave it to the local library.