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by Joan Didion
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.
What book or books are you reading this week? (01/09/2025)
I am reading Blue Nights by Joan Didion and just finished another book by Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, for the second time. Both are about grief after losing a loved one. I am also...
-Bridget_Smith
BookBrowse
"Joan Didion's writing seems to get more brittle with the passing of time; Blue Nights was just so depressing that even I, a fan of the downbeat and melancholy, felt bludgeoned by the sheer bleakness of it. Writers like Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood are doing a much better (and livelier!) job of mining similar territory, i.e., aging, the passing of time, family relationships, etc." - Marnie Colton
Other Reviewers
"[F]ull of fury and fragility and yet somehow anaemic... Even the passages where [Quintana] might have come to life are rendered needlessly brittle by Didion's stabbing, birdlike prose with its constant repetitions and exhortations such as 'Do note...' and 'Let me repeat...' Where the book is most successful - and most poignant - is in the viciously honest picture Didion draws of a lonely, encroaching old age." - The Guardian (UK)
"Essential reading for anyone who has ever mourned, has fretted as a parent, or simply loves good writing - that is, nearly all of us." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. The book feels like an epitaph for both her daughter and herself, as she considers how much aging has demolished her preconceptions about growing old... A slim, somber classic." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. Didion continually demonstrates her keen survival instincts, and her writing is, as ever, truculent and mesmerizing, scrutinizing herself as mercilessly as she stares down death." - Publishers Weekly
"...Didion is courageous in both her candor and artistry, ensuring that this infinitely sad yet beguiling book of distilled reflections and remembrance is graceful and illuminating in its blue musings." - Booklist
This information about Blue Nights was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo © 2003 Colleen Guaitolini
Joan Didion (1934-2021) was born in Sacramento, CA, the daughter of an officer in the Army Air Corps. A shy, bookish child, Didion spent her teenage years typing out Ernest Hemingway stories to learn how sentences work. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she got a degree in English and won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. The prize was a research assistant job at the magazine where Didion would work for more than a decade, eventually working her way up to an associate features editor. During this time she wrote for various other magazines and published her first novel, a tragic story about murder and betrayal, called Run River in 1963. The following year she married fellow writer John Gregory Dunne and the two moved to Los Angeles. The couple adopted a ...
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