It's hard to imagine what it took to write this. I see this both for its therapeutic value and for its Art. Her style has a stream of consciousness flow-you can feel her feeling her way through and processing her life experiences. I feel this is really what a memoir should be: a way of processing your life not just writing something that will become polished and done. She writes not just about death but life; not just about life but death. I have heard Didion described as holding back when what I actually feel about her is that she is the most vulnerable writer I've encountered. And this is what healing needs: to process the whole relationship. This was a more difficult read than The Year of Magical Thinking but possibly a greater achievement. ( )

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

This Joan Didion book is a sort of companion to The Year of Living Magically. In the latter, Didion tells the story of her husband John Gregory Dunne’s death and begins to tell the story of her daughter Quintana Roo’s health problems. Blue Nights focuses primarily on Quintana and her death toward the end of the book. One thing I found curious was Didion’s discussion of those who claimed that Quintana led a privileged life. She seems defensive about this and even says that anyone who thinks this can’t know about her daughter’s difficult health battles the last couple of years of her life. If ever there was a privileged family, it was this one. One of Joan Didion’s talents is writing about the details of where she is and what she is experiencing. Just about any time she mentions what people are wearing, she mentions which designer created that particular dress, or jacket, or whatever the piece of clothing a person was wearing. She is notorious for name dropping. Of course, how could she have helped this? She knew every famous beautiful person in the last few decades of her life. That said, I always enjoy reading Joan Didion. Just her beautiful writing is worth the price of admission. She will be missed. ( )

Bad timing. I began reading this book on December 23. The next day, I learned that Joan Didion had died. That added poignancy to this, since it is a book saturated with death and dying. One could even say the book is haunted by the memory of her husband, their daughter, and a friend of the family. By the end of the book, the author reluctantly confronts her own mortality.
Perhaps I should also mention that I chose this as something light to read while sitting in a hospital waiting room? So not only was my timing off.
Given the timing, it feels uncharitable to say so, but from the beginning, this book felt like a slim addendum to her Year of Magical Thinking, a powerful book. The writing is beautiful, although her repetition of sentences that act as leitmotifs, which was evocative, even mesmerizing for a while, began to wear on me. Even more irritating to me was Didion’s penchant for name-dropping. In a way, fair enough: she and her husband were bright stars in the literary firmament of both Hollywood and New York, so these people were a part of their social life, even their circle of friends (not always the same thing). But brand-name dropping? Christian Louboutin, Chanel, David Webb. Perhaps I feel left out because these evoke no pictures in me, as if I’m not the person Didion wrote this for. I nearly gave up on the book when she listed the hotels she, her husband, and her daughter stayed in. Then adds, when they were on expenses; then she named a hotel they stayed in when they had to pay the bill.
I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and reckoned with the possibility that she was aware of how this sounded.
And perhaps that this is part of the message of the book. No matter how well-padded your expense account, or even if you land in Columbia Presbyterian rather than Lenox Hill hospital, the time comes when you realize that medicine is, as Didion writes, “an imperfect art.” And even when that art is practiced flawlessly, we remain mortal. ( )

Thin, unsatisfying follow-up to The Year of Magical Thinking. ( )