#34: Blue Nights Joan Didion

Jacket Copy: From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
 
Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.
 
Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.

Why I was disappointed with this book: When I heard about the upcoming release of the book, I counted down the days until I would be able to go out and buy it. Expecting it to be an inspiring and touching book in the same vein as The Year of Magical Thinking, finishing it left me feeling robbed of what I had anticipated. Although just as personal (or perhaps moreso) than her first memoir, Blue Nights does not leave you inspired or with a greater understanding of life and love; it just leaves you depressed about mortality and pitying Joan Didion. Whereas the subject of her other book was her husband John Gregory Dunne--and to some extent her daughter Quintana Roo--in Blue Nights she focuses exclusively on herself and her own misery. It does not present her in a flattering way, and it is not what I paid $20 for the hardcover to read. To be fair, I did get at least something out of this book, though. It provides what I see as a very solid and plausible depiction of obsessive compulsive disorder and the formative events that lead one to develop the disorder.