Blue Nights
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.
On Dec. 30, 2003, Joan Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, came home from visiting their daughter in the intensive care unit, where she was in a medically induced coma. That night at dinner, Dunne died suddenly from a heart attack. Less than two years later, their daughter, Quintana, died, just after her mother鈥檚 most famous book was published.
Didion won the National Book Award for聽鈥淭he Year of Magical Thinking,鈥� her unsparing, lucid examination of her grief and tangled thought processes in the months after Dunne鈥檚 death. If you鈥檝e lost a loved one since 2005, the odds are good that someone has lovingly pressed a copy into your hands. Turning her investigative journalist鈥檚 eye inward, Didion鈥檚 ability to scrutinize her own consciousness to chronicle that raw time spoke directly to thousands of people reeling from loss.
That willingness to wield her honed talent on herself, as well as to look unflinchingly at a subject most Americans shy away from, are again on display in her elliptical, devastating new memoir, 鈥淏lue Nights.鈥�
The book鈥檚 title comes from the French word for the gloaming. In a preface, Didion writes, 鈥淭his book is called 鈥楤lue Nights鈥� because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.鈥�
鈥淏lue Nights鈥� opens on July 26, 2010, on the anniversary of Quintana鈥檚 wedding day. Didion shares glimpses 鈥� the 鈥減each-colored cake from Payard,鈥� the red soles of her daughter鈥檚 海角大神 Louboutin shoes. Quintana herself remains elusive, seen in snatches and scraps of her mother鈥檚 memory. 鈥淨uintana is one of the areas about which I have difficulty being direct,鈥� Didion writes.
She and Dunne adopted Quintana and brought her home from the hospital on March 3, 1966, when Didion鈥檚 career as a journalist was taking off. (She almost took the baby to Saigon, shopping for parasols and pastel dresses for them both. Happily, the trip was canceled.) When Quintana was small, the three traveled to New York, Honolulu, and Paris, staying in hotels while Dunne and Didion worked on screenplays like 鈥�The Panic in Needle Park鈥� and profiled the band Chicago. The five-year-old learned to order triple lamb chops from room service and sign for Shirley Temples.
Didion is oddly defensive about the question of 鈥減rivilege.鈥� It may not have been a conventional upbringing, but it sounds like the trio had a lot of fun. And who鈥檚 to say 鈥淏ambi鈥� isn鈥檛 more scarring than the 鈥淣icholas and Alexandra鈥� screening Didion took her daughter to?
鈥溾�榊ou have your wonderful memories,鈥� people said later, as if memories were solace,鈥� Didion writes. 鈥淢emories are not.... Memories are what you no longer want to remember.鈥�
Didion blames herself for many things: for not realizing the depth of Quintana鈥檚 fear of abandonment and for her own terror of not knowing what to do as a mother. 鈥淥nce she was born I was never not afraid,鈥� she writes, in what may be the book鈥檚 saddest sentence. When Quintana got her first loose tooth, her panicked mother nearly took her to the emergency room. 鈥淲hat I would not realize for another few years was that I had never been the only person in the house to feel the fear.鈥�
One of the things Didion approaches obliquely is what she calls Quintana鈥檚 鈥渄epths and shallows,鈥� which were diagnosed first as manic depression, then obsessive compulsive disorder, then something else Didion couldn鈥檛 remember. It didn鈥檛 matter, she writes, because that was soon replaced with another 鈥渄iagnosis.鈥� 鈥淚 put the word 鈥榙iagnosis鈥� in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a 鈥榙iagnosis鈥� led to a 鈥榗ure,鈥� or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility,鈥� writes Didion, who details her own bouts of ill health and inconclusive diagnoses in the book.
Frailty is a theme running throughout 鈥淏lue Nights.鈥� In addition to Quintana, Didion writes about the death of Natasha Richardson, whom she had watched grow up. And she discusses the physical cost of 鈥渕aintaining momentum鈥� and her own growing shakiness. At one point, during rehearsals for the play of 鈥淭he Year of Magical Thinking,鈥� she can鈥檛 bring herself to get up off a metal folding chair. Didion details days spent in hospital waiting rooms, trying to figure out who to put down as her emergency contact. She works on gaining weight and momentum. 鈥淢eanwhile ... I memorize my child鈥檚 face.鈥�
Didion once famously wrote that 鈥淲e tell ourselves stories in order to live.鈥� In 鈥淏lue Nights,鈥� her aim is a poignant variant. She wanted to prove 鈥渢hat my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.鈥� Not by a long shot.
Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.
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