franksbooks reviewed blue nights by Joan Didion
Review of 'blue nights' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Do not dwell on what’s lost, rather fear what we’re still to lose.
Published Nov. 8, 2011 by knopf.
blue nights
by Joan Didion
4 stars
(10 reviews)
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 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 …
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 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.
gtc-one reviewed blue nights by Joan Didion
Review of 'blue nights' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I am momentarily overwhelmed, but I am sure that later I will be glad that I read it. I think that my reading was a kind of rehearsal for real future sadness and aging, the coming grief.
DaveNash3 reviewed blue nights by Joan Didion
Review of 'blue nights' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. White Space - these are things that Didion is really interested in. The subject her daughter's death is reflected in a number of stylized meditations from her own mortality to Sophia Loren. Only Didion can write like this. She's a much different character now than her stand in Maria in Play It As It Lays, less icy and more caring. That's sweet. This is a quick read.
Based off of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Play It As it Lays, Blue Nights is a natural progression as the author has aged gracefully.
But she lacks the vision she had in 68. One anecdote - she had to work out as part of her physical therapy and noticed all these really fit guys and figured that working out must lead to real results. Then three weeks into it she found at those guys were the NY Yankees loosening up …
Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. White Space - these are things that Didion is really interested in. The subject her daughter's death is reflected in a number of stylized meditations from her own mortality to Sophia Loren. Only Didion can write like this. She's a much different character now than her stand in Maria in Play It As It Lays, less icy and more caring. That's sweet. This is a quick read.
Based off of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Play It As it Lays, Blue Nights is a natural progression as the author has aged gracefully.
But she lacks the vision she had in 68. One anecdote - she had to work out as part of her physical therapy and noticed all these really fit guys and figured that working out must lead to real results. Then three weeks into it she found at those guys were the NY Yankees loosening up between games.
Gossamerchild reviewed blue nights by Joan Didion
Review of 'blue nights' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
I made the mistake of really delving into this on the day my boyfriend left for a week-long business trip. Okay, so you can't really compare that to losing your spouse and child within a year's time, but it helped bring home the idea of loneliness and vulnerability Didion expresses so...I can't come up with an adequate enough adjective here. I've never actually read any of her fiction, but I love the power she has with words. Beautiful.
