Blue Nights

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.

🤍🕊️ 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.

my first book by didion, i love her

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.

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

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

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."

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.

Loved it. Love her.

Haunting and heartbreaking.

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...

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

2.5

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

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!