Joan Didion: Blue Nights

[leyla]

My short review of Joan Didion's Blue Nights is in the Indy on Sunday today. This is a book she wrote after the death of her daughter Quintana. Only a couple of years previously, Didion published an autobiography about the death of her husband; around the time that book was published, Quintana was admitted to hospital with a series of illnesses that would kill her a couple of years later. Blue Nights is therefore a harrowing book:

http://www.independent.co.uk/​arts-entertainment/books/​reviews/​blue-nights-by-joan-didion-6264​761.

Much longer review also available, will post up sometime.

[Stiffelio]

This poor woman is jinxed. Everybody around her seems to die on her so she can writer excellent books about her tragedies!

[miobrien]

I'm quite a fan of Didion. I admire her early work tremendously. And I certainly enjoyed The Year of Magical Thinking though it probably could have been a bit more dense at times. One thing I don't like about her style is her tendency to have one word paragraphs and stylish stuff like that.

But I've been looking forward to this since the start of the year. Recently watched Charlie Rose interview her. She's getting old, which is too bad.

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11979

[leyla]

She *is* getting old, and her health is failing, which is another of the causes of her depression. If I remember correctly, she was told not long ago that she has an aneurysm on an artery in her brain that could blow at any time. That's the kind of thing I would choose to know about only so I could do something about it, like have the aneurysm clipped.

Looking back, I do find the lack of detail about her daughter's long illness a bit frustrating. The book is primarily about Didion's grief and response to her losses, but since we are given snapshots of her daughter's unhappiness/psychiatric problems as a child and teenager, the absence of information about the sequence of events that led to her death is infuriating. Didion's previous book provided some information, but I'd like to have been told how the daughter's mental status was relevant to her illness (because I assume it must have been, since it received so much attention in the book).

I think it must also be harder to cope with adversity when you've led a charmed life for so long. Didion was a successful writer for so many years, and when she and her husband were both glittering literary/scriptwriter stars, and mixed with the Hollywood A list, life must have seemed golden. And their daughter was a beautiful creature as a child.

The number of people who have had double or triple bereavements in close succession is probably higher than most people realise, but most people don't write about them. That degree of grief is enough to fell most people. To go through the deaths of the two people you love most in the world is terrible - and to do it with no one else close for comfort - I got the feeling that despite her friends, Didion is quite isolated socially - must be hell.

[aao]

I started it recently, but haven't been able to finish it. What I've read so far is great and quite beautiful and insightful, really.

And, yes, she seems to be quite isolated and lonely. A great person.

[leyla]

Yep. Very sad, aao. Just shows how rapid the fall from happiness to devastation can be.

[aao]

I know, and this book is so incredibly sincere and honest and raw in each and every one of its sentences and the way they're written, that there's a whole other level of "narration" in what she chooses not to write or say. She's led a remarkable life in many ways, but she's also made a lot of mistakes, some of them quite big. But the thing is, she is so open about them, and talks about them in such a way that resembles something close to objectivity, that we empathize with her but never actually cease to see the whole picture, including the ugly, or even nasty things. Great book. An instant classic.

[leyla]

She *is* remarkably honest, aao. I compared her honesty and devastation in Blue Nights with Rachel Cusk's in my review of Cusk's Aftermath. Many readers have been very poisonous about Cusk on the Guardian's website after The Guardian ran an excerpt from her book but they miss the point that someone who reveals their own ugly flaws - as Cusk does with her initial unreasonable refusal to have shared custody of her kids with her ex - deserves respect at the very least for being so open. I think the vast majority of people are in denial about their faults and many will simply lie about their bad behaviour in the past. So criticising a writer who is uncharacteristically honest, exposing their raw feelings, for those uncharitable thoughts or actions is almost inviting more disingenuous celeb memoirs where all real life emotions and flaws have been air-brushed out and replaced with simpering and posturing.