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    Blue Nights
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    Blue Nights
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    Blue Nights
    Audiobook4 hours

    Blue Nights

    Written by Joan Didion

    Narrated by Kimberly Farr

    4/5

    ()

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    About this audiobook

    From one of America’s greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood.

    Several days before Christmas 2003, Joan Didion’s only daughter, Quintana, fell seriously ill. In 2010, Didion marked the sixth anniversary of her daughter’s death. ‘Blue Nights’ is a shatteringly honest examination of Joan Didion’s life as a mother, a woman and a writer.

    Recently widowed, and becoming increasingly frail, ‘Blue Nights’ is Didion’s attempt to understand our deepest fears, our inadequate adjustments to ageing and to put a name to what we refuse to see and as a consequence fail to face up to, ‘this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of ageing, illness and death. This fear.’ This fear is tied to what we cherish most and fight to conserve, protect, and refuse to let go, for, ‘when we are talking about mortality we are talking about our children.’ To face death is to let go of memory, to be bereft once more, ‘I know what it is I am now experiencing. 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.

    You may see nothing still to be lost.

    Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

    A profound, poetic and powerful book about motherhood and the fierce way in which we continue to exalt and nurture our children, even if they only live on in memory.

    ‘Blue Nights’ is an intensely personal, and yet, strangely universal account of how we love. It is both groundbreaking and a culmination of a stunning career.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateNov 4, 2011
    ISBN9780007443598
    Unavailable
    Blue Nights
    Author

    Joan Didion

    Joan Didion is one of America’s most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.

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    Reviews for Blue Nights

    4/5

    497 ratings29 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I think I may have liked this even better than "The Year of Magical Thinking." Both stark, fearless meditations on mortality, Magical Thinking talked about the death of her husband, and this one talks about the death of her adopted daughter. It includes passages like this: "In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see." 'Nuff said.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Joan Didion's prose is like a sunset. Slow, beautiful, yet so natural it doesn't seem forced or showy. This is a memoir of sorrow and morning. It is as though the words themselves are reluctant to recall such sadness. In it, Didion remembers her daughter's life and untimely death and the odd process of living on when it seems that one ought to have died. Gorgeous and haunting.
    • 3/5
      Blue Nights by Joan Didion
      188 pages

      ★★★

      Joan Didion is the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and shortly after THAT book was published, the author would tragically lose her daughter. This book, Blue Nights, follows the author’s life with her daughter and her struggle dealing with her death.

      If you enjoy Magical Thinking, this one reads much like this. She can be disjointed at times but I do feel, in a rarity, the disjointed writing can add to the feel – it ends up feeling like you’re reading a private journal. However, sometimes she almost went TOO much off course of the point and I had to be really patient until we got back to the point. Overall, I didn’t enjoy this one as well Magical Thinking but it was still sweet and heart-felt. It was short (188 pages) and I finished it quickly. Recommended if liked her previous work, in fact best to read Magical Thinking first as it goes much more deeply into her daughter’s illness before the death.
    • 4/5
      This Joan Didion book is a sort of companion to The Year of Living Magically. In the latter, Didion tells the story of her husband John Gregory Dunne’s death and begins to tell the story of her daughter Quintana Roo’s health problems. Blue Nights focuses primarily on Quintana and her death toward the end of the book. One thing I found curious was Didion’s discussion of those who claimed that Quintana led a privileged life. She seems defensive about this and even says that anyone who thinks this can’t know about her daughter’s difficult health battles the last couple of years of her life. If ever there was a privileged family, it was this one. One of Joan Didion’s talents is writing about the details of where she is and what she is experiencing. Just about any time she mentions what people are wearing, she mentions which designer created that particular dress, or jacket, or whatever the piece of clothing a person was wearing. She is notorious for name dropping. Of course, how could she have helped this? She knew every famous beautiful person in the last few decades of her life. That said, I always enjoy reading Joan Didion. Just her beautiful writing is worth the price of admission. She will be missed.
    • 5/5
      Blue Nights follows Joan Didion’s bestselling memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which had concentrated on the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. This memoir mostly focuses on the 2005 death of the couple’s adopted daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. While it’s sad for the reader to think that in the space of a mere twenty months she lost both her husband and her daughter, this book shows some of what it was like for her to deal with this brutal time. Yet, for a writer who some have labeled the connoisseur of catastrophe, writing about suffering has been something that she has done for many years now. As with Magical Thinking, she has to deal with this loss, not as an outsider looking at it a distant situation, but as one of the suffering victims experiencing it all in her own very personal life. While she was closely surrounded by this loss, she obviously had the skills, professionalism, and the strength of character to pull back and describe it so well, so that we strangers can get a sense of what her life was like then. This blurb from the book’s back cover states the range of the book well: “an intensely personal and moving account of her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding motherhood, illness, and growing old.” In addition, The Economist wrote: “Ms. Didion has translated the sad hum of her thoughts into a profound meditation on mortality.” As someone who lost his longtime spouse and continues to attempt to deal with it by writing long into every night’s darkness, I think I have a sense of what putting it all into words does for a survivor. Reading Didion’s words has helped me even more. Stepping back a bit from the raw everyday pain of an intense loss, and trying to express some of it in meaningful, expressive words, is a way of finding oneself, as well as seeing the larger picture of life … and death. Didion’s work is in a class by itself. For decades, I often explained the joy of great nonfiction writing to bookstore customers by citing John McPhee in the following words, “he’s talented enough to write an entire book about oranges, make it fascinating, and you won’t be able to put it down.” In her many books, Didion often sank her teeth in some very weighty subjects, and she always wrote from a personal space within herself. These two books of personal loss are amazing and show her incredible strength and intellect, that was contained in such a tiny little lady.
    • 4/5
      A sad yet not self pitying look at fragility, aging, and loss.
    • 4/5
      That was an interesting read. Didion remembers her daughter. It begins with her wedding, because the pictures of the clothes have impressed her. In between, she tells of saying goodbye in the hospital when her daughter died. She talks about the bondage of the two women and how her daughter repeatedly claimed that she must be the strong and her mother needed her. This becomes clear in the course of reading, because Ddion slowly loses her memory and steers towards dementia.The story is told with love and humor.
    • 5/5
      Wow. Beautifully written, very thoughtful, a stronger work (in my opinion) than Didion's much-lauded The Year of Magical Thinking. Very sad, of course, or maybe melancholy rather than sad, but I thought it was absolutely exquisite.
    • 2/5
      I was hoping I would really like this book but I just could never get into it. It was confusing and seemed to jump around. It never grabbed my attention and I was a captive audience in the car. Sorry, just could not finish this book.
    • 4/5
      Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, written after the death of Didion’s daughter, is a reflection on aging, death, and having children. The book is written in snapshots that appear to be loosely organized. It reminds me of an interview she once gave, discussing Play It As It Lays, in which she said that she wrote the book chapters out of order, tacked them on a wall, and reorganized them in a way that made sense to her. (Or maybe it wasn't Play It As It Lays, but Run River, or A Book of Common Prayer.) If this book was written in the same way it wouldn’t surprise me. The chapters are short and episodic, and they work wonderfully.

      Yet Didion tells us herself in this book that her style of writing has changed. She has been forced to become more direct. She worries that this is a side-effect of aging, a sign that she is losing her mental capabilities. She worries that she won’t be able to remember the right words. Not only that, she worries that her memories, which as she points out, are not at all a blessing like people say, are fading. These memories are something that she hates, yet cannot live without.

      I used to think that aging was nothing to worry about, that perhaps as a natural process of living it is even beautiful. But what did I know? I have yet to lose anything to the process of aging. Nothing has made me fear aging more than this book. As Didion says in the closing chapter, “The fear is not for what is lost. . . The fear is for what is still to be lost” (188). She has made me realize that there is so much to lose in life and that it is all unavoidable. It is because this book is so personal that it is so heartbreaking. Didion has not lost her touch like she worries.

      I’ve heard people complain that Didion name-drops too much in this book. I don’t think it’s a way to show off. I think it’s an act of remembrance. To say, I knew these people, spectacular or not, even well-liked or not, is almost an act of happiness. (Or maybe it isn’t, as she points out, “Memories are what you no longer want to remember” (64).) It’s saying, I lived through all that. And in the case where it’s people who made her happy and people she loved, remembering is a beautiful act. Yes, it’s luxurious, but it also shows a time of happiness she took for granted. And she took so much for granted, had so many misconceptions about life and motherhood. This makes it all the more tragic that she lost those people. She is saying, we all lose a lot. It hurts to find out the Blue Nights don’t last forever.
    • 4/5
      At the risk of imperiling my reputation as a somewhat perceptive reader, I will hereby go on record as one who does not entirely adore Joan Didion. Blasphemy, I know. I'll do my best to explain why with reference to her most recent book.Although I find much beauty and subtlety in BLUE NIGHTs, as in other work by JD, these fine qualities are often undercut by a plethora of class and social trappings. I find myself trying to insert blanks in place of names I recognize as show business celebrities. How differently would events appear if these were figures known personally to the narrator but to the reader not at all? Surely the author shouldn’t be expected to omit people who played a real role in her story. But at the same time, mentioning famous names, great cities, major hotels, brands of clothing, and the like comes to occupy significant space in the book. I suspect we are meant to pass these off lightly, paying only slight attention, as if to the manor born. But instead I get stalled in a quandary as to whether these trappings indicate that the rich and famous suffer like the rest of us, or whether it’s the opposite: they suffer unlike the rest of us amid a lifetime of special details. Perhaps their loss is far worse than the average because you’ve already read something about it on the Huffington Post.About one third of the way into the book, JD observes that “a certain number of readers” is apt to call the lifestyle she describes “privileged” due to the presence of household help and an extensive infant wardrobe. Use of the term, she says, is “a judgment…an accusation,” to which she “will not easily cop.” (Resorting to an interesting, somewhat outdated, expression that I associate with the hippie era.) So what is on display when we read, not merely of a nice, new dress, but “one of [several] pastel linen Donald Brooks dresses” purchased for a trip to Asia? If this is not some variety of privilege, why not explore the expectations imposed on a writer’s public persona? Why are pricey clothes the first order of business when one lands an international assignment? Is there something about the media industry JD worked for that made it important to note the brands of things or big name endorsements? Is there anything afoot in Hollywood that might have contributed to the eating disorder she acknowledges (but seems to prefer blaming on her mother)?No doubt it’s unfair of me to expect even so intelligent and wide-ranging an author as JD to elaborate socio-cultural topics in a book devoted to loss, aging, and decline. But I, too, have seen a child’s life dangle by frayed threads. I, too, have lived with the endless grief of that particular loss. And I, like everyone privileged enough to grow old, am dismayed at the onset of frailty, the fading of vision, the loose trap of a once sharp mind. We have so much in common, I can’t help thinking I should somehow manage to meet JD on one of these blue evenings. But I never feel as though I encounter a person in this book—only a persona. Of course, that’s always the case, even with memoirs: some facts are excluded, others emphasized, order imposed on chaotic reality. But where so much pain is evident, I long for at least an illusion of connection, while JD creates a harrowing account of one who seems left exclusively alone.
    • 5/5
      Writing a review of Joan Didion's simple, clear and true book feels absolutely impossible to me. She touched at so much loss, so much life and so much fear that it should have been unbearable to read. And it was. But I also consumed it in a day and a half. Her love for her daughter and her husband and so many friends and family is evident in every sentence, every idea and thought aches with her love. Her love and her confusion and her wonderment are so familiar that I'm reassured and frightened when reading it.
    • 2/5
      I loved The Year of Magical Thinking so I was looking forward to reading Didion's latest book regarding the loss of her daughter, Quintana, although I knew that this would hardly be an upbeat read. Maybe it was just my mood in reading this book, but I have to say that I rapidly got tired at the unrelieved tone of despair that emanates from every page of this slim volume.I'm sure the author found some cathartic release in the writing of this book, but for the reader there is just page after page of despair over both getting old and losing a child. Do not read this book if you have clinical depression because it will probably lead to suicide.
    • 5/5
      This is more personal and more pain-filled than any of Didion's previous writing, but not just because she explores the death of her daughter, an awful experience, with grace while communicating the full horror of it. Didion also writes about the pain of aging, of losing parents, friends, husband and daughter but also of losing mobility and strength and authority.
    • 3/5
      I like memoirs a lot and this one goes down easy. Didion has a way of writing that is uncomplicated, but still beautiful. I really appreciated her thoughts on aging.
    • 3/5
      A quick read describing her thoughts and remembrances after she loses her husband and daughter. Much is focused on the idea of growing older and dealing with illness and frailty as well as regrets. A good contemplative read that struck home for me as I am growing older. A particularly meaningful book for older readers and anyone who has suffered loses in life.
    • 3/5
      My first Didion. Only now I realize that perhaps it may be one of her weaker works, and I will try elsewhere.

      I realize it may seem callous of me to go on saying that her heartfelt emotional pain on the death of her husband and daughter is 'weak'. I admit I felt an odd depressive disconnect from reading things instead of a closer and closer attachment.

      It seems incomplete somehow. I adored the beginning, but the rest seemed unfinished.

      Read on your decision, not mine.
    • 4/5
      This is Didion's very frank attempt to deal with loss of her only daughter, Quintana Roo, the trials of growing old and her role as a mother. There are pieces of this book which are beautiful and spoke to my heart, but as a whole, it fell short; it wasn't as fine as [The Year of Magical Thinking]. There seemed to be a lot of repetition and I never grew close to Quintana Roo. For those who enjoy Didion, you may enjoy her reminisces about people and times.
    • 4/5
      Just a heartbreaking book. Didion has written so much about loss, with The Year of Magical Thinking (following the death of her husband) and now Blue Nights, about the death of her only daughter. It's a reflection on other forms of loss, however, the poignantly visceral pain she feels towards her daughter's death is also contemplated alongside her own realizations of old age and the truth of her own mortality. I had to put the book down a couple of times to cry; no mother should ever lose a daughter, and it's clear from this text that though the book may have been therapeutic, Didion has been so fully broken by the events she will never fully heal.
    • 3/5
      Lovely short book that deals with the author's increasing feelings of frailty as she ages. She has an unusual way of writing, often repeating certain lines though out the book. Early in the book this sentence required repeating reading for it to make sense and I'm still not sure I understand: "This was a few weeks before he required us to pump in the Vikane that killed the stephanotis, killed the mint, and also killed the pink magnolia into which the twelve-year-old who took so assiduously removed a view of our suburbia hjouse in Brentwood had until then been able to look from her second floor sitting-room windows." It still exhausts me.I am grateful the rest of the book was not as complexly written.
    • 5/5
      Despite the incredible odds against a writer producing a memoir describing a second round of personal grief so soon after releasing one focused on the death of a spouse, Joan Didion has done exactly that. In that sense, Blue Nights is almost a sequel to The Year of Magical Thinking in which Didion detailed the emotional trauma associated with the unexpected death of husband John Gregory Dunn, a loss from which she barely recovered. But, as it always does, life goes on – even when it leads to the death of one’s only child, as it did for Joan Didion less than two years after she lost her husband.Because Quintana Roo was already dangerously ill at the time of her father’s death, the two books overlap in ways that will be illuminating to readers already familiar with The Year of Magical Thinking. Although the first book primarily focused on the relationship between Dunn and Didion, the couple’s adoption and assimilation into their lives of the baby they named Quintana Roo plays a major role in their story. With Blue Nights, the focus shifts more, but not entirely, to the life they shared with their new daughter. John Gregory Dunn and Joan Didion traveled in exclusive Hollywood circles for much of their lives. They lived the good life, a lifestyle that sometimes placed them and their daughter on the sets of major motion pictures and in the after-hours company of the Hollywood elite of the day. The two were good at what they did and they were rewarded well for their efforts. Little Quintana (who would, as an adult, meet her biological family) held her own in that world despite some early signs that she might not be as stable as she appeared.For instance, the little girl would for a long time be obsessed by the scary Broken Man who threatened her in her dreams, a man she would later describe in colorful detail. At five, she would inform her parents that, while they were out, she had called a mental institution to ask what to do if she went crazy. But in the context of their world, this behavior only seems unusual to Didion in retrospect - as she questions whether she might have done a better job raising her daughter. Blue Nights is actually more about Didion’s reaction to the loss of the two people closest to her than it is about her daughter’s life, a focus that leads directly to what is perhaps the most brutally honest portion of the memoir. Joan Didion, in her late seventies at the time of this book, is also grieving the loss of one life skill after another as she approaches eighty years of age. She is horrified by an incident that left her dazed and bleeding from a fall she cannot recall to this day. She describes the devastating onset of shingles from which she still sometimes suffers. She rages against her increasing frailty, especially the decreasing sense of balance that makes her so vulnerable to bone-breaking falls. She is saddened that she will never wear her favorite dresses or high heel shoes ever again. She fears that her writing skill, the very talent that defines who she is, is deteriorating. Worst of all, she must experience old age without having around either of the two people she loved most in the world.Rated at: 5.0
    • 2/5
      For whatever reason, this book did not work as well as Didion's wonderful The Year of Magical Thinking. There is an element of repetition in Blue Nights that did not portray the emotional and mental confusion of a woman who has lost her daughter. Rather, the repetition of the stories of how Didion came to adopt Quintana Roo and Quintana's later obsession with those details seems cloying, almost dull in their insistence on reliving the same emotion over and over even when it did not seem to matter in terms of what she was writing.One of the biggest and most oft-levied criticisms of Joan Didion is how self-indulgent she is in terms of writing and some even extrapolate it into her own life (asking how self-indulgent one must be to name a child Quintana Roo). I never bought into that criticism that much because all autobiographical writing is self-indulgent to a point. But in this book I could see the accusation had some legs because as I read, I felt as if Quintana was a prop, not a person in her own right. Of course the book is Didion's reaction to her daughter dying, not her daughter's biography, but even taking that into account, in a book of how Didion reacted to her child's death, her child seemed filmy and far away. A person whose life only mattered because of how Didion reacted to her death.One cannot condemn Didion for this - a book about grief has its own rules, I suspect. But it was a flat, tiring experience reading this book.
    • 4/5
      Sad book. I did want to know the reason for the death but I suppose it was a book about a life and that of a mother.
    • 4/5
      I read this book in two hours. Large print, many short sentences and paragraphs, much repetition. Deliberate, not careless repetition, that is emotionally powerful. Blue Nights is more about Didion's own aging and her response to that and to the death of her daughter, than it is about her daughter. Whatever is the opposite of sentimental, this book is that. Didion identifies what she sees at writing as lack of attention to aspects of her daughter. She doesn't want mementoes, she wants real, strong memories. I liked Blue Nights. I have had an adult daughter die, and I am dealing with the decripitudes of aging. This does not mean I think Didion and I are in any way similar, but it does mean that I appreciate her front-on approach to both.
    • 3/5
      If you can get by the her depression after losing a child, failing health, and portens of aging, you can tease out the expected Didionesque incisive analysis of her situation.
    • 2/5
      One of those books I plodded through and then asked myself wny. While it was probably cathartic for the author to write about her feelings about losing her husband and daughter as well as her own health issues, I didn't find anything of significance for myself in this book. A bit of self indulgance on the author's part.
    • 4/5
      It seems so crass to criticize her two memoirs, when they're so brutally honest and must have been so difficult to write. And I feel better that I did like this better than The Year of Magical Thinking - it seemed more reflective, more integrated, more psychologically processed. But I still have problems with her discursive writing, and most especially the name dropping.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book, but not as much as I like The Year of Magical Thinking. Still there were some very powerful moments. Not only was Ms. Didion writing about the loss of her daughter, she was writing about your own morality.
    • 5/5
      Joan Didion is one of my favorite writers, and I think this may be one of her best books. It's a meditation on loss and aging. It's a heartbreaking story, beautifully told. It's personal, but universal.As usual, Didion comes across as fearless and lacerating, in her sentiments and her sentences. But this short book also has a hypnotic aspect, with haunting repetitions that mirror the mind's process of circling around and back to memories.Because the book is about how we attempt to make sense of things. Here, love and pain. Motherhood. A beloved daughter. Loss. But Didion often, perhaps always, writes about the way we try to tell our stories. How we weave selected events into a narrative structure, to make things make sense. Our lives, our friends' lives, our culture. I think of "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" and many other Didion masterpieces. As she said, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." This is one of those stories.