I finished a book on my Kindle this morning called “Blue Nights.” I should say the book ended, but I didn’t expect it to end. I didn’t want it to end. Like one of those movies the curtain closes on, and you are left with more questions than answers. In Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights” haunting and dismally depressing, the art of her writing expressively tells us about her grief over the death of her 39 year old adopted daughter Quintana Roo, and about so many other parts of her life. We feel her grief and we feel everything she has to say. Her misgivings about her own parenting. Her feelings of guilt for perhaps contributing to her daughter’s death. Her inability to foresee that Quintana headed down a road to alcoholism, because of her mother’s unbridled drive to write and write and write, despite all the red flags. Did Joan’s obsession with work push her daughter into self-annihilation? Had Joan made herself more available, would her daughter have grown into a healthy woman, maybe even a mother herself? Many critics have allured to the same. Even Joan comments on how all Quintana knew as a child was the life of fancy hotel rooms and movie sets. Yet, Mother shaming is nothing new.
Joan wrote “Blue Nights” in 2011, several years after Quintana died on August 26th of 2005. In October of the same year she published “The Year of Magical Thinking,” another memoir about mourning over the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, who slumped over lifeless in his evening chair from a heart attack, in 2003. Obviously the time couldn’t have been worse. While she was writing in grief over her husband’s death and about ready to publish her work, their own daughter expired from a bout of pneumonia caused by the flu. (NPR) In “Blue Nights” she wrote in detail of the death itself, the visit to the hospital with her son-in-law and the subsequent memorial.
With raw realism of “Blue Nights” Joan revealed her own surmounting health issues from aging, and her fear of being alone. She starkly expressed how one night after she went out she came home and in the morning found herself passed out in a pool of blood in her apartment. She realized that more than ever she needed someone by her side in her old age, and she wished more than anything that she had Quintana Roo.
There is nothing new about Joan Didion’s aloneness as a widow, and a parent who lost a child. Plenty of older men and women find themselves in this situation with much meager means to provide care for themselves than Didion. But it is the artfulness with which Didion tells her story, and the poignancy of her feelings that spill out on the page that drew me into reading on and on. Her narrative is like riding on a roller coaster, gliding down at full speed taking quick turns at the bottom and climbing back up to the summit again. Thrilling and scary, you never want it to end, but suddenly the car stops and it’s time to get off. It’s difficult to do justice in a description of Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights.” I won’t even try anymore. I can only say it’s a book to be experienced. Joan Didion is a natural writer. The volumes she left to the American literary heritage are invaluable and will undoubtedly be relevant for many decades to come. Her works should be read and she should be judged on her own merit.
On Tiffany Creek 