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Blue Nights

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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.

'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 Thinking

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Everyman's Library)

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.

Blue Nights are those gorgeous long evenings of summer when, long after the sky and sun has gone down, the sky retains a transcendent purple hue, something that Vincent van Gogh might have painted. Joan Didion expresses it better on the opening page; I use my own words only to be unique.

Didion has had a charmed life. She asks herself in the book whether to call it privileged. In terms of absolute wealth, a plethora of servants, and mansions scattered throughout the world she concludes that she has not. Nevertheless, in the wealth of names she can drop, acquaintances she has made in the Hollywood scene, the literary scene, and the intellectual scene, she has been privileged to be among the best, or perhaps one might say, the most celebrated personalities of her era.

Her description of a childhood resonated with me. She was independent; we California children of tht era were independent. We were allowed to do almost anything we wanted, both out of our parents' sense that taking risks was an essential part of accruing the life's experience that you needed to be an adult, and the fact that they were too busy with important things such as winning the war to spend every moment engaged as "helicopter parents."

Didion describes the transformation from a free, unfettered, experiential childhood to the cloistered, protective childhoods of today. A telling event was the kidnap murder molestation of Stephanie Bryan in the 1950s. The Hearst newspapers exploited it to sell millions of copies. Every mother's heart was gripped with fear, and they thenceforth held tighter on to their offspring. The tragic loss to the Bryan family was magnified by the publicity. I was a schoolmate of Bryan's sister, who struggled mightily to live a normal life. At any rate, Didion survived in adventuresome childhood that would have created 1000 panics in the life of any modern mother, and no doubt grew up the better and the stronger for it. Her parents had faith that she had the wits to survive, and she did.

Didion has suffered the loss of her child, Quintana Roo, her husband John Gregory Dunne, her good friend Natasha Richardson, and many other people close to her. Of course, having a wide circle of friends and growing older - she will celebrate her 77th birthday in December - exposes a person to the risk of loss. Nevertheless, Didion's losses seem to be out of proportion, unjust. They are the flip side to the charmed life that she led.

Didion has written quite a bit about her life and other essays. This book provides only vignettes, but they are delicious. Summers in St. Tropez,, room service in the best hotels throughout the world, Malibu, Topanga Canyon, and luxury apartments in New York. She recites the names of the subtropical flowers that adorned her Southern California homes, names that certainly few of the citizens who admire them on the streets could identify if called upon. She talks about her daughter's upbringing. Whether or not one would call it privileged, Quintana attended the best schools and palled around with the best of friends. She was exposed at an early age not only to life's luxuries, but to a broad palette of intellectual and artistic tastes. At an elementary school age she was not a mere movie fan, but a movie critic.

Didion describes at some length the adoption process and the identity questions which never resolved themselves. Is this really my child? Is this really my mother? Would this mother abandon me as that my other mother did? Didion poses these questions well, laying out all of the issues but never even attempting to resolve them. They cannot be resolved.

Although Quintana died at a young age, and was afflicted by some sort of a psychological or neurological disorder which could never be properly identified, she has to have been satisfying to her mother. She succeeded in, if not a literary career, at least a career in letters as a magazine editor. Adoptive children are a mixed bag, and she must count herself lucky that she got one with the intellectual ability to achieve some success in her mother and father's arenas.

The tragedies of Didion's life brought her in contact with more doctors, physical and psychological, then any person would wish to encounter in a lifetime. The tragedy of life is that these doctors can seldom even agree on a diagnosis, much less a course of action, for any but the most self-evident maladies. Didion indicates that she did what we all do. Recognize that they are only guessing, that they are probably wrong, and follow their advice willy-nilly. As she comes to grips with her own frailties, her own mortality, she has no better prescription than to follow the doctor's advice, but she is too worldly wise to invest a lot of faith in their proclamations. She is advancing to her own meeting with her maker, to her own inscription on the wall of the Cathedral in New York City, with an unclouded understanding of the uncertainty of her own path and that of all mankind, but with no doubt as to where it all ends.

This is a beautifully written, touching biography or autobiography, wonderfully excerpting the most delicate and touching points to tell a beautiful story.

I sat down to write a review of Joan Didion's new book, Blue Nights, when I noticed that the fragrant breeze wafting in through my window reminded me of those warm humid evenings in Paris when Jack Nicholson, who is a dear friend, and Andy Warhol and his lovely daughter, and I would sit on sumptuous pillows on Jack's balcony, sipping absinthe, reading poetry aloud, and inhaling the hibiscus scented winds arising from the gardens surrounding Jack's bungalow. The moonlight glinting off Andy's Rolex, which was given to him by the Sultan of Brunei, could almost bring me to tears with its elemental beauty. But I digress...Blue Nights is a magical book. Almost as magical as that afternoon I spent off the coast of Perth on Bill Cosby's yacht, dining on fresh octopus steaks and plump loganberries flown in by Walter Cronkite as a wedding gift for Robert DeNiro's twin sons. Bill's Givenchy bathing suit and Cartier slippers were like dueling forlorn gods, bellowing in muted anger at the forgotten dreams of youth. Blue Nights is a book about the death of Didion's daughter, and death is as sad as the time Pablo and Paloma Picasso
lost Pablo's Harry Winston diamond denture cup in the warm, sparkling waters of the Perfume River in Saigon, where I had gone to shoot a movie with Francis Ford Coppola and Jackie Onassis. Jackie's Ralph Lauren blouse, made of artisanal cotton from the plantations at the Four Seasons Hotel in Madrid, was so comforting and real that I immediately phoned my good friend Meryl Streep and told her to order a dozen each for herself, me, and the niece of the King of Spain, who has always been someone I could count on. The niece...her nickname is "Pinata-ita", or "little pinata"...you should taste her butter cookies, served on porcelain plates retrieved from Mao Tse-Tung's palace, and eaten with forks fashioned from silver and gold from Sir Lawrence Olivier's dental fillings. Shoot..I meant to write something with meaning here and instead just
name-dropped as many celebrity friends, designer apparel, and exotic places as I possibly could. Kinda like Didion does in Blue Nights. The frantic name-dropping is nauseating. She finds herself getting old and tries to reassure herself, and assure the reader, that she has had a good life by referencing as many famous friends and fancy duds as she possibly can. And to do all this in the context of mourning a daughter, who gets a lot less print than all Didion's name-dropping? It's gross, and boring. Shame on Ms. Didion for this weird and insulting book. But speaking of books, Johnny Carson (who mixes the best vodka martini in California) once confided in me.....

It can't be easy to be Joan Didion and it certainly wasn't easy to be her adopted daughter. As most readers know, Ms. Didion had to endure the cruelest kind of one-two punch: the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne followed by the death of Quintana Roo at age 39.

And now, years after writing The Year of Magical Thinking, she revisits this dark year in Blue Nights: "This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning."

I quoted this prologue at length because the book is less about Quintana than it is about her mother, the author. Ms. Didion eventually states, "The actual subject was not children after all...the actual subject...was this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death." Or, in other words, "it's now about me."

The author eschews the word "privilege" ("Privilege remains an area to which - when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later - I will not easily cop.") But it is hard for the reader to NOT think of Quintana Roo as privileged, at least from a material sense. Joan Didion asked for - and received - a beautiful baby girl from St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica (the girl HAD to be "beautiful"), purchased miniature wooden hangers and expensive dresses. Quintana, at the age of five, had stayed at the St. Regis and the Regency, The Dorchester in London, and so on.

We learn that Quintana was not a happy child or adult who was terrified of an imaginary "Broken Man" and lived with a fear of abandonment. But more than that, we learn that Didion needed her daughter and that her own vulnerability may have trumped Quintana's overriding need for protection. Whether Joan Didion was a good - or at least a good enough - mother is for her to judge, although there is evidence that she loved Quintana to the best of her abilities.

The more important question in this book is whether memories - or art - can save us from life's worst tragedies. There is deliberate repetition here - a lot of it - as the author strives to create order from chaos, presumably to answer that question in the affirmative. Yet at the end of the day, there is an elusive, even insubstantial quality about the book as it gradually shifts to the diminishing sense of her own possibilities.

On August 26, 2005, Joan Didion's 39-year-old daughter, Quintana Roo, died in New York Cornell Hospital after a long siege of illness that began with the flu and ended with her death from septic shock, barely 20 months after the sudden passing of Didion's husband, John Dunne. In THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, Quintana's struggle formed the backdrop for Didion's account of her life with Dunne and her effort to cope with the enormity of his death. Now, from the same store of still raw memories, this time with her daughter at center stage, Didion has fashioned an equally compelling meditation on parental love, loss, memory and the perils of old age.

Didion begins on the day of Quintana's wedding in July 2003, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, a time when Didion "still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as `ordinary blessings.'" Two years later, Quintana's ashes were interred in that same cathedral, and like an endlessly running tape loop, Didion's narrative circles backward and forward through time, almost defying any attempt to construct a coherent chronology. Perhaps that's a reflection of the fragmentary pieces of memory she's trying to reassemble, and a concession to the challenge of stitching together the multiple threads of this short, but complex, book.

At the heart of BLUE NIGHTS is Didion's exploration of the blessings and burdens of parenthood. She describes the quick, almost casual way she and Dunne were able to adopt Quintana immediately after her birth in 1966. She then dwells, amid stories of her daughter's sometimes troubled childhood (more privileged than many, but hardly extraordinary) on the contingencies that might have prevented that adoption from ever taking place. In her early 30s, Quintana's siblings and birth mother make an appearance, but the reunion --- warm and friendly at first --- is a mixed blessing, and ultimately confirms Didion's feelings about the "muddled impulses that can go hand in hand with adoption."

Describing herself as the beneficiary of a kind of "benign neglect" in childhood, Didion contrasts that with the way we "now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us." And yet, for all that, Didion understands there is no magic at her command to ward off sudden death or the ravages of disease."When we talk about mortality, she writes, "we are talking about our children."

That same sense of futility emerges again when Didion despairs of our effort to hold on to tangible objects, like talismans, to help us recall our loved ones. Sorting through a box of mementos, she muses:

"In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.

"In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here."

"How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see."

But she is perhaps most effective in describing her own attempt to grapple with the countless deprivations of aging, made even harsher in her case by the loss of the two people she held most dear. Now 77, she traces with clinical detachment the markers of her own physical decline --- the night she passed out in her apartment and awoke dazed and bleeding; the painful onset of shingles in 2007 that continues to leave its mark; and an unexplained disorder, "this neuritis, this neuropathy, this neurological inflammation." Most of all, she tries to sort out the fear and frailty that plague her in the wake of these losses. "Aging and its evidence remain life's unpredictable events, yet they remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored," she concludes. Even from a writer as cool and detached as Didion, it's hard to imagine the steely determination it took to stare down so many unpleasant truths so directly.

Didion is no less candid in expressing her fear about never being able to write again: "What if I can never again locate the words that work?" She's obsessed with maintaining her "momentum," reflecting on the wisdom of Quintana's determination to get over the death of an acquaintance by deciding simply "not to dwell on it."

But on the evidence displayed in these haunting pages, it seems she has no reason to fear that her powers as a writer are diminished. All the hallmarks of her inimitable prose style are here: spare, precise diction, incantatory repetition, elliptical passages and persistent questions. These devices are employed to powerful effect as we accompany her from the land of mourning into a brighter past and then back again to darkness and confusion.

"What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?" asked Euripides, his stark and terrible question echoing down through the centuries to be invoked by Joan Didion. In this eloquent, sorrowful memoir, she bears witness to that most unspeakable of losses.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

At a conference I attended once, a young and fiercely idealistic CEO of a hospital stated his goal in life: "When I lay my head down for the last time, when it is my time to die, I want to be able to look back over the years and know that what I did with my life, professional and personal, changed the lives of my family and friends, and the lives of the people that came through my hospital system, in a deeply positive way". Blue Nights, Joan Didion's memoir/partial autobiography/memorial to her husband and daughter, is a sort of "Now I lay me down to sleep" narrative, delivered from the vantage point of 75 years of life on planet Earth.

Didion's life pathway has been strewn with deaths of family members (husband and daughter) and significant friends, as well as with not a few health problems of her own. There is an Arab saying "All sunshine makes a desert". There has most certainly been rain in Didion's life. A memoir such as Blue Nights offered the opportunity to see what oases of wisdom and tranquility could bloom in the desert when the water of tragedy is applied. Did Didion utilize this opportunity? Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and neurologist that survived the Holocaust, said "Who is to give light must endure burning". Blue Nights offered Didion the opportunity to share light with her readers, light emanating from the searing pain of personal loss that she suffered. Most simply put, many cultures have come up with proverbs that reduce to this: without pain, there is no wisdom. Didion details the pain that she has experienced in life in Blue Nights. Does she leverage that pain to bring her readers wisdom? Does Blue Nights give light that radiates from the intense suffering that Didion has endured? All humans eventually face death, both our own, and of those we love. When the sunshine in Didion's life was obscured by the rain storms that befell her (and befall all of us), is it clear in Blue Nights that she used those floodwaters to nurture the growth of wisdom that we readers might vicariously access? I would argue that in writing the beautiful prosody and intriguing autobiographical tale of Blue Nights....that Didion did not, or could not, answer those questions in the affirmative.

Memoirs can be read for a variety of reasons, all of which are probably legitimate. Read from the point of view of gaining an interior view of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of one of America's great writers, Blue Nights succeeds. Many psychologists and psychiatrists agree that loss of a child is the single most stressful event adults can endure, and Didion's formidable writing talents bring home such a tragedy with devastating force. Blue Nights also succeeds on the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" level. Didion does compulsive name-dropping in this book. At times, when she feels the reader might not understand the importance of the person she is has just mentioned, the story veers away from tragedy into a Wikipedia like segment on just WHY the person she is mentioning is such a luminary. Such is the case when we become thoroughly informed about the importance of an organized crime figure whose table Didion sits at. At best, such information seems like a bit of a non sequitur; at worst, blatant self-aggrandizement.

Quintana Roo, Didion's adopted daughter who died at age 39, occupies a front and center position in the book. I should mention that I have been a Joan Didion fan for 40 years. I'll also say that in Blue Nights I felt that Didion's treatment of the agony of losing a child veered into frank melodrama, and cloying sentimentalism. Didion's writing, long an example to me of startlingly insights and clear-eyed analyses of the country and culture that she has grown up in, has seemed almost absent of sentimentality and melodrama in the past. No longer is this the case. It is true that sentimentality and melodrama sell well in the entertainment world. Most would agree that neither are the hallmarks of excellence in art.

Those that enjoy highly detailed accounts of celebrity lives will be entertained by Blue Nights. Readers actively pursuing the liqueur of wisdom that can be distilled from the crazy fermentation called life are not likely to find resonance with this book. Some say that the definition of important art is that it both entertains AND informs. Blue Nights makes it halfway there.

In her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion reports that her daughter Quintana was upset because she felt different compared to her contemporaries at school. No one else at school, she says, had a cousin murdered. (I think she mentioned an uncle who committed suicide, too.)(I am paraphrasing here.) Her father, John Gregory Dunne, says to her, "Don't worry, it all evens out in the end." Joan Didion's comment to herself at that time was, "Couldn't he do better," although she says nothing to console her daughter.

Years later (same book), Didion is talking with Quintana's best friend, who was there during the original conversation, "I got what he meant," she tells Didion (and I think the friend also meant that Quintana got what he meant), that life evens out because everyone has his and her share of losses and wins.

The saddest thing is how untrue her father's words were--because it didn't even out in the end for Quintana.

Quintana Roo's murdered cousin was Dominique Dunne-a young actress who'd appeared in Poltergeist, and whose murderer was let off with a very light sentence. Dominick Dunne was her father and it was her murder that made him the man and writer he came be. The injustice of all of it gave him the ferocious passion and will to live.

Everything didn't even out for Dominique either.

She used to babysit Quintana.

I've never felt sadder in my life for someone I didn't know than I feel for Quintana Roo Dunne.

From a recent article in New York Magazine, Didion is quoted: "I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself--there is a basic indifference toward people."

I don't know what to do with this information--this indifference towards people. It's always been there--in essays, in novels--but what does it mean to a reader?

In Martin Amis's review of The White Album (1980), he notes that "Only someone fairly assured about certain of her bearings would presume to address her readers in this (in fact) markedly high-handed style. The style bespeaks celebrity, a concerned and captive following ...." The most obvious example of this is in the Life essay that begins "`I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind..." To wit, said celebrity, said concerned and captive following....

What do you do with her use of her daughter's desperate words about wanting to die? They were first used in Didion's novel Democracy. How did her daughter feel when she read that? (Although, Quintana famously said she didn't read her parents' books because she didn't want to judge them.) But it begs the question, how could Didion use her daughter for her fiction?

In Blue Nights, Didion uses those words to show us that Quintana was mentally ill very early on, Quintana had a death wish at a very early age. Some readers have taken from the opaque and vague description of Quintana that Didion is trying to protect her. Oh, but the little that she reveals says so much.

We're told in Blue Nights that Quintana was a nervous child, frightened of life and death, viz., her dreams of The Broken Man.

However, in an early essay, Didion described Quintana, at age one, as easy, trusting: happy to go to bed, happy to wake up.

How does a happy, trusting child grow up to be nervous and sad? Or perhaps Quintana wasn't really a happy, trusting child but the demands of narrative in that particular essay required Didion to fudge the truth a bit? See--we don't know what's true.

Didion has said that Blue Nights raises more questions than it answers. And perhaps that says it best, although I don't mean it for the reasons Didion does.

I am on Quintana Roo's side. She is not here to speak for herself. She is not here to explain herself. I don't care if she was an alcoholic, I don't care if she was unconsciously or consciously in collusion with death. (Several people have dropped these tidbits in some articles.)

I am on her side. I recognize in Quintana an inability to defend herself.

I have questions about the insights and examples that are used to illustrate her mental illness--some shamelessly leading the reader to conclude that perhaps Quintana's mental illness was in-born(and let's not forget she was adopted)!

Take Didion's use of Broken Man: He appeared in the toddler's dreams when they were living in a "senseless killing" neighborhood. No other families lived in the area -- the other houses were half-way houses, old-age homes, and the location according to Didion had a generally sinister quality to it. Think about the kind of people Quintana might have seen around -- "nurses in soiled uniforms," drunks, druggies, strange men in blue shirts....

While living there, Didion wrote Play It As It Lays -- an aggressively nasty book that brought her fame. What would life in that house be like while she was writing it, what would Didion be like? During this period recalled in some of her personal essays, she wrote about strangers coming to her door and people calling up to get her involved in drug deals. A baby sitter in one essay tells Didion her aura is black; which means death she is told. In Slouching towards Bethlehem, a hippie girl does Didion's name numerology and sees death, too. (Coincidence or should we all begin believing in numerology and auras? Or is there a bit of fudging going on here?)

Didion discusses making an "elaborate" Easter lunch for a large group of people and yet not knowing some of the people who stayed overnight--leaving her uneasy. She was engrossed in the transcript of a trial of a particularly brutal murder and having migraines more than a few times a week (the essay "In Bed") and did reporting that took her away from home for weeks on end. My point: Who is to say the nightmare wasn't a legitimate response to living in that house, located in a pretty seedy area, with people reading and writing about murder, suicide, drugs and nasty sex (see Play It As It Lays). After all, Didion says the nightmare stopped when Quintana Roo was five -- in other words, when they moved out of that house.

Another example Didion uses to showcase that mental illness was just maybe in Quintana's nature was when she reported to her parents (around the age of 5)that while they were away she called a mental hospital and asked what do if she went crazy.

Mental hospitals and breakdowns are a certain standard in Didion's essays and fiction-- Didion's father was hospitalized for depression, she had the famous breakdown (an out patient as she made clear)in 1969, John Gregory Dunne had a breakdown around that time, and Didion even wrote in an essay that her husband wondered why the only people he heard about in Didion's parents' house were those committed to mental institutions or booked for drunk driving. In other words, mental hospitals, breakdowns, going crazy, was in the air--a lot!

The child was trying to greet her parents and make herself a part of their world, their life. She is trying to break through to them, maybe she even thought that calling a mental hospital would make them more interested in her.

Quintana we are also told called a major film studio to ask how to be a star (for a child whose parents were seduced by and trying to seduce Hollywood) it is again like asking to be a part of their world--celebrity, Hollywood, actresses (it was an actress friend of Didion's that led to their getting Quintana). Why wouldn't the little girl want to be an actress, a star?

Broken Man, calling a mental institution, calling a film studio, are presented as examples of Quintana's peculiar behavior. But what is pointed out as peculiar behavior isn't so peculiar when you see the context.

Why wouldn't she pick up on craziness and Hollywood stars? And why wouldn't she try to engage with her parents by acting on the things that she saw as engrossing them.

Her parents (unbelievably blindly) act perplexed by what she said and did. Their attitudes distanced themselves from her and her take on them. And why would the child not react to the dismissal of her efforts to connect with them with anxiety and depression. It is heartbreaking.

I understand that Didion has suffered. I can't imagine how else it would be.

Having a family member suffering the loss of an adult child, I had anticipated reading this book and then sharing it. I found few insights, however, that were worth sharing. The book is a disjointed catalog of memories and experiences that have meaning to no one but the author. While its writing may have provided catharsis, it leaves little for the reader to take away.