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75 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Hard Language of Truth, November 2, 2011
This review is from: Blue Nights (Hardcover)
I've been reading Joan Didion's work for nearly half a century--I got hooked by her early collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and have read every thing she's written since. For years I began my Contemporary American Literature class at San Diego State University with the famous first sentence from her collection, The White Album: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." I used that as a keynote to the course because I wanted students to understand that stories are not merely entertainment (although they can be that) but life essentials. Without them life as we know it would be impossible. Ask anyone a basic question: "Where are you from?" "What school did you go to? What do you do for a living? And so on, and he or she will tell you a story. We use stories to link together the disconnected moments of our lives, or as Didion so cogently puts it in "The White Album," "We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the `ideas' with which se have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." "Shifting phantasmagoria"--that's how we perceive our lives-- just one thing after another. And sometimes those kaleidoscopic images can shift from bright dazzling colors to dark opaque hues with just a single twist of the lens. This is of course what happened to Didion. As everyone knows, in the last several years she has suffered mightily. Her stunning, heartbreaking book, The Year of Magical Thinking, which told the story of her husband John Gregory Dunne's sudden, unexpected death, haunts the memory and takes us inside a deep, unsettling grief that turned her life upside down. Blue Nights is in a sense a sequel to that book, as grief piled upon grief and less than two year's after her husband's death, she lost her daughter, Quintana Roo, , who had been seriously ill since even before her father's death. Blue Nights tells the story of that second loss, and conveys the incomparable anguish a parent feels upon losing a child. But it also goes beyond that to become a meditation on the inevitability of death, and both the frailty and surprise of old age. This latter part of Blue Nights, which explores Didion's newly-bestowed identity as an ailing, anxious, lonely, disconnected, forgetful old woman is especially hypnotic reading. As Gertrude told Hamlet, " `tis common; all that lives must die/Passing through nature to eternity." This universally common reality is the story that Didion tells in the last and strongest section of this book. All of her yearning for the presence of her daughter while extremely moving, echoes much of the longing she experienced for her husband's presence in The Year of Magical Thinking. But here she takes us even more deeply inside her anxieties and vulnerabilities. She worries about losing her ability to write, to move about, to walk without pain, to remember things. She acknowledges the strange heightened sense of accelerating time that is peculiar to old age. Read this remarkable passage, which anyone older than 70 will surely relate to--but because many readers will be much younger than that, it will give them an inkling of what's coming. "Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than a small child...has just described them as `wrinkly,' or asked how old they are. When we are asked this question we are always undone by iots innocence, somehow whammed by the clear bell-like tones in which it is asked. What shames us is this: the answer we give is never innocent. The answer we give is unclear, evasive, even guilty. Right now when I answer this question I find myself doubting my own accuracy, rechecking the increasingly undoable arithmetic (born December 5 1934, subtract 1934 from 2009, do this in your head and watch yourself get muddled by the interruption of the entirely irrelevant millennium), insisting to myself (no one else particularly cares) that there must be a mistake: only yesterday I was in my fifties, by forties, only yesterday I was thirty-one." It's hard to stop quoting from Didion as she connects dots. She was thirty-one when Quintana was born...and that of course was only yesterday as well, and then all the yesterdays come tumbling down, all her "what-ifs," all her nostalgic memories of her early life in LA when they called freeways by names instead of numbers, when she "could still do arithmetic, remember telephone numbers, rent a car at the airport and drive it out of the lot without freezing, stopping at the key moment, feet already on the pedals but immobilized by the question of which is the accelerator and which is the brake." This is unsparingly honest and brave writing about the kind of thing old people usually go out of their way to cover up. How honest it is is revealed in the final two sentences which contrasts what she tells the rental car attendant with what she tells the reader. Here is absolute honesty about the ongoing dishonesty of us who have entered our seventies:
"I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.
"I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give." When you have the kind of long-term life relationship with a writer that I have with Joan Didion you feel that you know him or her personally. Although I have never actually met her, it feels like I'm reading about my own family--my own life. Don't be put off by the grimness of the subject matter; this book is a treasure.
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58 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues, November 1, 2011
This review is from: Blue Nights (Hardcover)
'And while I'm away
Dust out the demons inside
And it won't be long before you and me run
To the place in our hearts where we hide
I guess that's why they call it the blues'.
Elton John, Bernie Taupin Joan Didion has given us her best, she has humbled us with her honesty of her inner world. In this second book after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003, after which she wrote 'The Year Of Magical Thinking', her daughter, Quintana Roo, died. How could anyone survive this kind of grief? In 'Magical Thinking' she wrote about her grief and how she coped, but now we know that was just the beginning of her grief. She is now in the midst of her grief for the two beloved people in her life, and does grief ever leave, do you move on and do the memories suffice? Joan tells us she could only grieve for one person at a time, and writing this book opened the flood gates for her grief of her daughter, Quintana Roo. Joan Didion shares her experiences. Joan Didion opens the book talking about the Night Blues, and how and why this book was named. She says, " 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." It is a period of time to get through, and in this case with Quintana Roo, when someone dies, don't dwell on it. Joan was thirty-one when she received the call that a baby girl was ready for adoption. She and her husband rushed to see her, and they knew immediately that she was the one. They had at one time been in Mexico when they noted on a map, these words 'Quintana Roo'. A place, and they were determined to name their daughter if they had one, that exact name. Quintana Roo grew up to be a very precocious young thing. Ready to do the unexpected at amy time. She became an adult, her other family, the other parents, found her and she had a relationship of sorts with them for a short time. She realized she was not capable of this type of relationship and it was short lived. She married and within a few months she was in an ICU fighting for her life. She was in a coma, when her father, John Dunne died. Joan told her daughter about her father's death when she awoke from her coma. And, then, within a short period of time Quintana was back in an ICU dying. Joan Didion remembers her daughter in bits and pieces, telling us of their life together. The memories are everywhere, but they are not enough. Joan Didion tells us, "I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them. As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all, at least not children per se, at least not children qua children: their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death. This fear." The fear of fragility, the fear of living and the fear of being. Joan wonders, as we all do, was she a good mother, was she enough, did she give her daughter everything she needed? There is the guilt all wrapped up in her grief for Quintana. There are no answers, there is only the honesty of her words as she expresses herself. She only knows she misses her daughter, every day, every hour and every minute. It does not matter from whence we came, we all have the same needs, and we all want our lives to be successful, and our children to carry on. It is not something to bear, that of a parent burying their child. I can only imagine that kind of loss. The fear that Joan Didion speaks to, is the fear for what is still to be lost. Highly Recommended. prisrob 11-01-11 The Year of Magical ThinkingWe Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Everyman's Library)
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46 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bad taste in mouth after reading, November 21, 2011
This review is from: Blue Nights (Hardcover)
I have always loved Joan Didion, to the point that I thought she could do no wrong. I would await each new book with absolutely no hesitation that I might not enjoy it. The same happened when I received "Blue Nights" and I launched right into it with the comfortable knowledge that I would surely love it. About halfway through, I realized the biggest reaction I was having to the book was annoyance. Ms. Didion, while clearly distraught by her daughter's untimely death, seems to be too self-conscious of how she herself comes across in the book, making sure to share more n enough detail about how fabulous and successful her life has been. Quintana Roo, as I fear might be the case in real life, seems to be an afterthought, someone who provides some funny quips for her mother to use in her writing. Quintana Roo seems to me like a little girl desperately wanting her parents to love her and include her, apparent in such stories like her daughter's "sundries" or her "cancer diagnosis" (chicken pox). I think theone part that confirmed for me that DIdion is no longer accessible to her readers is when she oh-so-delightfully explains how on all the trips they would take Quintana Roo on, her daughter didn't understand what it meant to be "on expenses" and "not on expenses." How dare a little girl not realize that when a big studio is picking up the tab, you can order caviar, but when your parents have to actually spend their own money, you can't spoil yourself with othe people's money? What an adorable tale to relay to the everyman reader! Didion has lost me at this point. As another reviewer noted, I would love to know more about Quintana Roo, but maybe it's someone else's job to tell us about her, someone who won't be so self-aware of her own portrayal in the story as is clearly the case with this author.
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