Rating: 76% | C | ★★★☆☆
Warnings: + Death + Illness Synopsis (from Goodreads): From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old. Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Review: It is somewhat impossible to review this book—not necessarily because of its subject matter, but because of the distance at which Didion holds the reader. The reader is confined to an observer's role, just as Didion is an observer to her daughter's illness and to her own frailty. As Didion physically weakens, the reader can do nothing but feel frustrated alongside her. The synopsis on the back cover implies that Blue Nights is a masterpiece of commiseration, something for grieving parents to read, but this is a suggestion that vastly oversimplifies the book. What is so frustrating about this collection, in addition to the reader's distance, is Didion's apparent lack of finesse; essays leap between past and present, between quiet days and devastating days. Grief is not linear, and not even a writer like Didion can escape its powerful disruption of life. Nevertheless, this disjointedness renders the book difficult to read. I was crying for the tiles, the Minton tiles in the arcade south of Bethesda Fountain, Sara Mankiewicz's pattern, Quintana's christening. I was crying for Connie Wald walking her dog through Boulder City and across Hoover Dam. I was crying for Diana holding the champagne flute and smoking the cigarette in Sara Mankiewicz's living room. I was crying for Diana who had talked to Blake Watson so that I could bring home the beautiful baby girl he had delivered home from the nursery at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica.
Perhaps more than any of her other collections, Blue Nights is about Didion herself—her concrete personal life. The reader comes in close contact with details about the author that shatter popular perceptions of her as an ordinary private citizen. It is clear in Blue Nights that, in her later life, Didion was accustomed to certain creature comforts and privileges that were not as evident in her earlier 60s- and 70s-focused works. Didion's casual name-dropping of celebrities like Natasha Richardson are occasionally jarring. These moments do not detract from her accomplishments, but they produce occasional moments of atmospheric inconsistency in a book that is otherwise about something deeply painful and tender.
Blue Nights reads as a largely un- or self-edited work—for better or for worse. Its status as one of Didion's last works immortalizes it; its content and organization argue for much less critical scrutiny.
2 Comments
6/19/2023 08:13:09 pm
So real and true. I definitely agree that the extent to which details of her setting and environment were sprawled thru the story kind of displaced the reader— at times the exposition felt like that of a magazine profile. Of course this is not to say the story wasn’t precious and personal, but it is firmly entrenched in a world so deeply her own that there is no intimacy with the reader. Not a criticism just a standout part of the experience of reading it
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Kathryn
7/2/2023 01:24:43 pm
Admittedly, I don't think I'm the right audience for the book, but somehow I can't imagine ever growing into becoming the right audience for this book. I feel like I've read memoirs before where I'm also not the right audience (culturally, background-wise, etc.) but I've always been able to form a deep connection with them. Maybe it's Didion's towering legacy or the localization of the story to a very specific era and life, as you point out, but I'm still at a loss.
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From the ArchiveWhile my main reviews are organized by seasons and I try to write reviews immediately after I finish reading, there are always stories that lose to the hustle and bustle of everyday life. From the Archive is a redemptive collection of mini-reviews of books I read in the past that continue to captivate me.
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