Book of the week: Blue Nights by Joan Didion

(Knopf, $25)

Following the death of her husband, the writer John Dunne, in 2003, Joan Didion “made out of her bereavement a remarkable book,” said John Banville in The New York Times. The Year of Magical Thinking became an instant classic, one that spoke directly to all who have lost a loved one, and to all who merely anticipate the emotional devastation that will accompany such a loss. Yet tragedy had by then struck Didion again, when in August 2005 the couple’s adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, died, at 39, of pancreatitis. Blue Nights exists as a sorrowful coda to its predecessor. An “honest, unflinching,” and utterly moving memoir, it’s an attempt by Didion to summon back her daughter in a prose portrait, and to explore her second bout with unspeakable grief.

“Pain is written in every line” of this searing book, said Margaret Sullivan in The Buffalo News. Quintana, who was named by her parents for a state in Mexico, emerges here as having been a comically precocious child, one who grew up in five-star hotels and could wax critical on films by age 5. As Quintana matured, she developed mental problems: manic depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder. Yet despite all the story promises, Didion never lets us get truly close to Quintana, said Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Review of Books. There’s a sense that Didion made a deliberate effort to relate the story at arm’s length, perhaps out of concern for her daughter’s privacy. “Instead we get imagery”—plus the names of hotels, restaurants, and celebrities. Oddly, Natasha Richardson’s sudden death from a skiing accident gets more space than Quintana’s husband.

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Blue Nights certainly lacks Magical Thinking’s directness, said Julie Myerson in the London Guardian. “If ever a piece of writing sprang from an impulse to claw a loved one back from death’s grasp,” it was that National Book Award winner. But this is a different project, odder and more elliptical. Didion may hold back details about Quintana, but she is “viciously honest” when it comes to her own current state. At 76, she is near the end of her own life and alone. As you read, “your heart breaks for her increasing and incurable frailty.” Encouraged by her friends to find solace in her memories, Didion “doesn’t want memories, she wants the real thing—her husband and child—back with her.” No one can blame her.