Would give it 3.5 stars if possible, or close to four. Didion has been my favorite writer for more than 20 years. This book is totally her, served raw. Only Joan Didion can get away with writing like Joan Didion. Otherwise, large parts of this book would be strangely embarrassing. I was struck many times by the lovely, forlorn quality of this book. But just as often, I was puzzled by her ability to withhold information, given that she is so singularly hailed as someone -- a journalist, in a way

I wrote a review for this & the computer ate it. I haven't the heart to try to rewrite the whole thing. Suffice to say that this book was not as sad as The Year of Magical Thinking although I expected it to be harder to bear. To lose a husband is one thing, but to lose a child far, far worse. Thinking about my son dying makes me literally sick to my stomach. I expected to be cut to bits by this. I wasn't, which is good for me but bad for the book. The tiny intimate details that made Magical Thin...

did i just found my favourite book of the year? yes. is this the second book i've read this year? also yes.i cant even begin to explain how much i loved this book. this was so beautifully done, of course, we are talking about THE joan didion, but i cant even believe how good of a book i just read. i dont think theres a bigger pain than the one a mother feels when she loses her child, every chapter of this book is the proof of that. it truly felt like she put everything in here, and she did so in...

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I am very sorry poor Joan D's husband died, and then her only child is dead. But, she writes this book in a confusing way, and I'm not sure what to make of it. Even the title phrase, which she tries to explain, is elusive to me. I learned way more about her life and her daughter in her prior book (The Yr of Magical Thinking). That topic was the sad and sudden death of her husband. This book is about the sad and not sudden death of her daughter, who die...

i'm left in awe of how much love joan didion had for the people in her life, and how much unbearable grief she experienced as she lost them.this is much more all over the place, and not quite as compelling as, the year of magical thinking, but the loving way in which joan depicts her daughter is enough to make up the difference.what an artist, what a life, what tragedies.between the loss of joan didion and the losses she suffered, this is such an emotive book. wow.bottom line: my year of joan co...

I should preface this review by saying that I adore Joan Didion's writing. There really is no one better at cataloguing the social chaos and energy that defines a specific shot of history than her. I grew up in the California of the 1960s and 1970s, and if anyone asks me about those years, I point to her. Like most of her readers, I read with such sadness about the death of her husband and daughter, and finished her book The Year of Magical Thinking with such profound respect; she defined unfath...

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue…you pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue…over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades… As I type this, I wonder if I'd be so lucky as to come across a blue night tonight; the tranquil sight of a sky so clear, yet so blue. Deep blue

I had two contrary reactions while reading this book. The first: this is all just too private for publication. Didion, a sad, frail woman, grieving for all her lost friends and especially for her husband and daughter, feels compelled to torment herself with a detailed analysis of all the occasions when she may have failed as a parent, all the occasions when she thinks that she missed what her daughter was trying to tell her. Each photograph or memento which she describes becomes the occasion for...

A few years ago I was riveted by Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, the memoir about coping with the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Blue Nights is Didion's subsequent memoir and dedicated to her daughter, Quintana Roo. Didion's powerful writing is both beautiful and heartbreaking as she mourns the loss of her daughter and her struggles to cope. Didion describes the sudden onset of her daughter's illness as occurring during the period of blue nights - the long, light ev...

My first work by Didion, this is a follow up to The Year of Magical Thinking, where Didion wrote about the loss of her husband. This concerns the loss of Didion’s adopted daughter Quintana Roo (in 2005 at 39), not long after the death of her husband. Whilst Didion does cover the adoption of her daughter and some of her earlier life, but she also goes on to relate the effects of aging and her reflections on them. Didion has worked with words for a living and she is good with them. Her ability to

A brief yet heart-aching, poetic insight of grief relating the death of Didion's adult daughter Quintana. It's in the blue nights that the questions, the grappling for answers plague us. As Didion explains this'Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, "the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning"

in the year of magical thinking, joan didion explores the grief of losing her husband john, who died suddenly at the dinner table while her daughter quintana lay in hospital. in blue nights, didion explores the grief of losing quintana, who passed away only a few months later. blue nights serves as a continuation of didion’s reckoning with grief, another instalment of her trying to make sense of life and death - two subjects which are, by their very nature, nonsensical. like with every didion...

I loved this even more than The Year of Magical Thinking. Special shout-out to the goodreads reviews of this book that imply (and sometimes state) that it’s “not sad enough”—they gave me my first true, belly-deep laugh in weeks

well. this was a huge disappointment. i loved the year of magical thinking, didion's memoir about the unexpected & sudden death of her husband, to which blue nights will inevitably be compared. the most positive thing i can say about blue nights is that its length (around 180 pages) & ginormous font make it a quick read.this book is a mishmash memoir about the death of didion's adopted daughter quintana & didion's inability to come to terms with her own aging. the two topics don't mesh well & th...

The scuttlebutt about Blue Nights is that it's really different from Didion's other work, and that is true. But it's not different in a bad way! Of the Didion books I've read, this struck me as the most poetic: Certain evocative phrases are imbued with significance and repeated throughout the text; I thought this was beautiful and effective and gave the book an almost obsessive quality that was completely appropriate. I'd been under the impression that Blue Nights was about Didion's daughter in

Well, it's probably blasphemy to say this, and I did give this book the highest possible rating, but some of Didion's stylistic methods: the lists, the questions, the coy mingling of abstract and concrete, were showing here. They felt like tricks rather than fluid means of transcending the personal and reaching the universal. I actually got annoyed with the narrator when she couldn't seem to answer her own interminable questions when the answers seemed obvious to me. Of course, if your mother ha...

Click here to hear my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive.

"In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and rolling the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue."-- Joan Didion, Blue NightsIt has been a decade since Joan Didion's daughter Quintana died. Joan Didion was 75 when she wrote this book. She wrote her first grief memoir The Year of Magical Thinking after her husband died in 2003. It dealt with her husband's death and her daughter's hospitalization (Quintana would later die in 2005 from pancreati...

In some ways Blue Nights , the grim companion piece to The Year of Magical Thinking, seems like the book Didion was put on earth to write--why else the long career as unsentimental witness recounting what she's seen without affect or excess? Here she turns her eye on the some of truest subjects of the human experience, the ones we avoid daily every way we can by spreading a fog of delusion around them: age, sickness, loss, and death. Didion writes with clarity and honesty about them all.In anot...