Blue Nights
Joan Didion
Fourth Estate
Memoir
Blue Nights suffered at the hands
of critics when it was first published. I found myself appalled at Germaine
Greer and John Carey dismissing this distinguished writer’s grief on Newsnight.
But they did their job and scared me off reading the book. What if they were
right and Blue Nights was all vacuous navel-gazing instead of the microscopic
examination of one’s own pain at losing first their husband and then their
daughter in the most unlucky of manners? So I left it a while but I’m glad I
went back to it.
Didion’s account of her husband’s
sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking, became so popular that her life probably
doesn’t need reiterating here. And Blue Nights is not a straightforward
retelling of Quintana’s life either, or rather Didion’s life while Quintana was
in it; it is broken because this is how memory plays out. Didion is clutching
at her memories of her daughter: the wedding, the adoption, the illness, the
sparks of darkness only lit in hindsight.
I began reading Blue Nights
knowing that I wanted to review it here and conscious that I did not want to
write an apology for a once great writer. Didion’s non-fiction is known for its
assuredness, even in The Year of Magical Thinking whilst rendered numb by her
bereavement she is still trying to be the good journalist, digging into the
situation, mining for its core truth. In Blue Nights that assuredness has been broken
down; nearly every sentence questions. One of the criticisms I’d heard against
this book was that it was hollow, with Didion putting herself at the centre
where her daughter should be. Isn’t it absurd for one person to criticise
another for not grieving right? And Didion is not really writing a biography of
Quintana Roo, she is writing a memoir of her own trauma, it just so happens
that that trauma is Quintana’s death and it swallows everything else, leaving Didion’s
life hollow, an empty, sinister playground for her memories to knock about in.
The writer is unravelling and the echoing sentences are the fraying evidence. The
echoes are baroque, always circling back to the same, now mythologised, starting
point: the phone call telling Didion that there is a ‘beautiful baby girl’
needing adopting at St John’s Hospital, Santa Monica.
Didion has also been criticised
for name dropping, for labelling the clothes they wore and the places they
went. But there are two good reasons for this: Didion could simply be trying to
help draw the picture, misstepping, for sure, by believing we know how to
visualise Christian Louboutin shoes, but are those shoes any different to the
pink ribbon a nurse ties into baby Quintana’s hair or the ‘cap like a Dodger
cap’ that the nightmarish Broken Man wears in Quintana’s imagination? She could
also be noting how these things, fashion labels and swanky hotels, mattered during
Quintana’s life and now mean nothing, ghosts of their former glories. It definitely
seems like lazy thinking to pick on Didion for this materialism when she points
it out herself in the book.
‘Despite recognizing that for a woman my age even
to note such details of appearance will be construed by many as a manifestation
of misplaced vanity.’
For a journalist who put herself
inside the situations she wrote about, the memories related in Blue Nights show
a very different woman, a woman on the quiet side-lines of her own life, a life
that was filled with other people. She is more comfortable writing about aging
and medicine than about Quintana and it produces sentences that prove her
standing as a literary giant.
‘My memory would slip but whose
memory does not slip. My eyesight would be more problematic than it might have
been before I began seeing the world through sudden clouds of what looked like
black lace and was actually blood, the residue of a series of retinal tears and
detachments, but there would still be no question that I could see, read,
write, navigate intersections without fear.’
Even the subjects of aging and
medicine give short respite before circling back to Quintana. When Didion tells
of a time she fell over, when she ended up being hospitalised, we see how empty
her life is. This is a time when all you really have is your family. We see
that without her husband and daughter, she is truly alone. The scene also
echoes Quintana’s childhood fear of being left alone. With her tiny size and
her vulnerability in age, Didion has become the lonely child. Sometime after
her loss she begins to learn again, how to read and talk. Like a child. She
lives out Quintana’s existence. It is another way for her to try and cling onto
her daughter. Didion again is beautifully precise; a family is not separate
members but one whole; we live each other’s lives.
Despite her loss of focus Didion
doesn’t stop trying to reclaim the exactitude of her pen. ‘Let me again talk to
you directly,’ she refrains again and again. Even the ‘you’ in that sentence is
not stable, fluctuating between the reader and Quintana. For Didion, this whole
book turns out to be her grasping onto what remains of her daughter. Didion
‘sees’ Quintana every day and is worried she will vanish entirely. Towards the
end of Blue Nights Didion is watching the theatrical performance of The Year of
Magical Thinking in the shadow of Quintana’s memorial service, adding another
layer of unreality and echo but, hopefully, reaching some kind of conclusion
for her.
