Blue Nights

#714
Title: Blue Nights
Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Knopf
Year: 2011 
208 pages

While The Year of Magical Thinking was easy to become absorbed in, and was an excellent evocation of grief, Blue Nights is a better-structured book. In part, this is because Didion is always so meticulous about language and the sequencing of scenes. Here, that very carefulness is subject to scrutiny. If The Year of Magical Thinking is about grief, Blue Nights may be about the defenses against grief, about ways of narrating, remembering, and depicting that subsume the emotional chaos of the experience. The Year of Magical Thinking was cathartic to read. Blue Nights may be about the agony of not making peace with overwhelming grief except by engaging with it only as a cognitive experience. Didion ruminates on her own mortality, draws parallels and identifies chasms between herself and her daughter, and demonstrates ways in which a telling cannot contain the subtleties of the experience, and may deflect the teller and listener. She uses the representation of privilege within the memoir to provide the reader with an experience to mirror hers of trying to understand her relationship with Quintana. If this sounds technical, it is, but Didion manages to convey her dilemma eloquently and without bogging down. It's a remarkable book and I recommend it highly.