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.
