Blue Nights, by Joan Didion, 4th Estate, $27.99
Only the great Joan Didion, perhaps, could ask this of us. To return to the well of despair and drink deeply, again, of her pain.
Her last book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was a searing response to the loss of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, after a heart attack at their dining table.
Blue Nights concerns the death of their adopted daughter, Quinana Roo, less than two years later.
It was a disease, there was surely nothing she could have done to save her daughter, but in that clear, cool, distinctive Didion voice she re-examines her lapses and failures as a mother (“only later did I see I had been raising her as a doll”) and celebrates the wonder of her girl and remembers the blue nights, the shining summer twilights when the family was together and time seemed to stretch forever, before the chill came.
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