Blue Nights, by Joan Didion

In Blue Nights (2011), Joan Didion pushes the limits which readers might be able to bear under the onslaught of personal revelations about her daughter’s death, her loneliness, her fears of aging, her marriage, and her family. Didion is the most personal of writers.  Her private insights reflect the outer world.  At times, one isn’t sure whether the world she writes about, or her private reflections, are more real, more important.  This method has worked to good effect throughout her career, especially in the essays of Slouching towards Bethlehem and White Noise and in other writings, such as Play it as it Lays, a novel in which the protagonist seems so like Didion that it is difficult to separate them. In this memoir Didion seems more fundamentally fractured, more vulnerable and scarred, than she does in any of her other works, including The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne.

The book has a rhythmic quality.  Didion moves back and forth in time as her thoughts and emotions dictate.  At points, she seems to leave the subject of her daughter behind entirely, but this is really an illusion.  Everything pertains to that reality: her daughter’s death at the age of 39 from complications from a lung infection. She doesn’t dwell on the details of the illness, or of other problems in her daughter’s life, though she does make clear her distaste for the sometimes abrasive and cruel practices of doctors and hospitals.

We learn a great deal about Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo: her adoption, her childhood precociousness and (sometimes) paranoia, her eccentricities and anxieties, and ultimately the diagnosis of manic depression.  Yet we learn much more about her impact on her parents, specifically on her mother.  The mother is the survivor. She agonizes over what she could have done to save her daughter, how she might have raised her differently, what she failed to notice.  She is full of self-recriminations, and more than once mentions her daughter’s statement that she was a bit “distant” as a mother.

“What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead.” This statement by Euripides is one Didion returns to repeatedly, an emotional refrain at the center of the book.  She reiterates her own observation: “when we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”

Just as it was difficult to read about the suffering of the Japanese tsunami victims in Richard Lloyd Perry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami, so here is it difficult to read about—to be exposed to, even plunged into—the writer’s grief, sadness, loneliness.