Joan Didion

Shares the author's frank observations about her daughter as well as her own thoughts and fears about having children and growing old, in a personal account that discusses her daughter's wedding and her feelings of failure as a parent.

Blue Nights

Essence

I find more faded and cracked photographs than I want ever again to see.

I find many engraved invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer married.

I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember.

In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.

In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.

How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.”

Helen 

Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

ln certain latitudes there comes a span of time solstice, Lapproaching andfollowing the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical Californi, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. 

lianna

Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency?

I think it over. I do not want even to consider “in case of emergency.”

Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else.

I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.

I mean, think back: what about that business with the folding metal chair in the rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street? What exactly was I afraid of there? What did I fear in that rehearsal room if not an “emergency”? Or what about walking home after an early dinner on Third Avenue and waking up in a pool of blood on my own bedroom floor? Might not waking up in a pool of blood on my own bedroom floor qualify as an “emergency”?

All right. Accepted. “In case of emergency” could apply.

I could give the name of my brother, but my brother lives three thousand miles from what might be defined in New York as an emergency. I could give Griffin’s name, but Griffin is shooting a picture. Griffin is on location. Griffin is sitting in the dining room of one or another Hilton Inn—a few too many people at the table, a little too much noise—and Griffin is not picking up his cell. I could give the name of whichever close friend in New York comes first to mind, but the close friend in New York who comes first to mind is actually, on reflection, not even in New York, out of town, out of the country, away, certainly unreachable in the best case, possibly unwilling in the worst.

As I consider the word “unwilling” my lagging cognition kicks in.

The familiar phrase “need to know” surfaces.

The phrase “need to know” has been the problem all along.

She is of course the one person who needs to know.

Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

I am able to imagine telling her because I still see her.

The same way I still see her weeding the clay court on Franklin Avenue.

The same way I still see her sitting on the bare floor crooning back to the eight-track.

The same way I still see the stephanotis in her braid, the same way I still see the plumeria tattoo through her veil. The same way I still see the bright-red soles on her shoes as she kneels at the altar. The same way I still see her, in the darkened upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, inventing the unforeseen uptick in Bunny Rabbit’s fortunes.

I know that, should I try to reach her—should I take her hand as if she were again sitting next to me in the upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, should I lull her to sleep against my shoulder, should I sing her the song about Daddy gone to get the rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in—she will fade from my touch.

Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.

Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.

I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.

I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.

What is lost is already behind the locked doors.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

The fact that I finished this in one sitting should speak to how much I loved this book. Something about Didion’s prose and imagery just makes reading her work come almost naturally. 

muskaan bal

🤍🕊️ joan loved so deeply. her love is palpable, as is her pain. despite it all, blue nights & the year of magical thinking are the most beautiful dedications to the loves of her life.

annalyse! 

paula

I find Joan’s writing voice comforting and vulnerable. At the same time, I am not overwhelmed with any new insights or thoughts. I like her books but they are not a life changing five stars for me.

Marisa Ringgold

Shares the author's observations about her daughter as well as her own thoughts and fears about having children and growing old, in a personal account that discusses her daughter's wedding and her feelings of failure as a parent.

Laura Mauler

I was hoping for a little more about her daughter and their relationship, and less repetition of cryptic one-liners.

jennifer 

definitely was written in her voice. a lot like stream of consciousness with some poignant prose on grief in between. she really captured grief’s ability to catch you off guard and how grief inspires denial well. Her idea of earth shattering was pretty unique. nice read.

thank you, joan didion. i will now be thinking about death and aging for the next week straight 

Emmett

Read this in one sitting on the plane and the utter darkness in an airborne shell is the ideal environ for Didion's words of pain percolate and blossom. If she's not one of the pioneers of the 'personal essay' genre she surely perfected the form. She wringing beautifully wretched images from personal tragedy, groping for sense she finds premonition and symbolism in real life. Grief - of a parent at the death of her child, of a lover at the death of someone loved, at deaths of those she knows in general, is raised by her craft to heights beyond navel-gazing repetitive self-obsession. She revisits and reflects insistently, carves out what must feel like a new abrasion from an old wound in these well-trammeled thought-corridors, insight and light spills out as do blindness - because sometimes it seems there really is nothing to understand apart from the freshness of pain. And then, from these personal essays on sudden deaths of friends & loved ones at the cusp of their prime (or before it), she whips right around to confront her own physical fragility, as a woman in her seventies. As an old woman recognising the most of her years are now behind her, charting slow decline and all the emotions and sea changes that come with. (When this reader reads this, she reads it with a shiver of seeing what she herself must become, because Time wills it, decades from now.) Whether it is the recognition of ageing and the impending darkness, or a mortal person confronting the mortality of others in retrospect, she bears witness with astounding rawness and dignity.

"When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not. One day we are turning the pages of whatever has arrived in the day's mail with real enthusiasm -... the next day we are walking uptown on Madison past Barney's .... and we are not even glancing at their windows. One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor's office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear gold hoop earring, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress ... Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency? I think it over. I do not want even to consider "in case of emergency." Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not."

Jeannette Ordas

This book is cold and slightly off-putting and it's sadly no Year of Magical Thinking. Didion recounts losing her daughter and growing old with dreamy clarity, but without the intimate details that made YoMT such a great read. A bit of a let down.

Amy Thibodeau

Taylor

From one of America's greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood and a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter.

Sabine Delorme

Die Atmosphäre im Buch hat mir trotz der Traurigkeit und des Schmerzes sehr gut gefallen. Es fühlte sich an, als würde Ms Didion neben mir sitzen. Schmal und elegant, vielleicht eine Zigarette rauchend und ihren Gedanken nachhängend. Sie versucht, ihr Leben zu verstehen, zu verstehen warum ihre Tochter fast unausweichlich so werden musste, wie sie war. Sie versucht, ihren Tod zu begreifen und mit dem Verlust zurecht zu kommen.
Die gesamte Rezension findet ihr hier: http://bingereader.org/2014/10/22/blu...

Marlee Stark

My favorite (and first) Joan Didion book. Read Year of Magical Thinking first.

Jade Flynn

From one of America’s greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood.

Jales

hard. not strong as the other ones, but hard.

Ana Couto

The first book I ever read by Joan Didion was South and West, which I wasn’t crazy about. But I’m always hearing how great of a writer she is, so I decided to give her writing another go, and I’m so glad I did. I loved her memoir Blue Nights, which is about Didion’s thoughts and struggles upon losing her daughter, Quintana. It’s also a meditation on motherhood, childhood, the specific hardships that most adopted children inevitably face, and the contrast between life and death. Didion has the rare gift of being able to transmit her feelings across the page and into the readers’ hearts. Truly one of the greatest writers out there!

Blue Nights

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