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Blue Nights Hardcover – November 1, 2011

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Joan Didion (Author)
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Joan Didion (Author)
3.9 out of 5 stars 244 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (November 1, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0307267679
  • ISBN-13: 978-0307267672
  • Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (244 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #370,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsThe Hard Language of Truth
By Federico (Fred) Moramarco VINE VOICE on November 2, 2011
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
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.Read more ›
5 Comments 190 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
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4.0 out of 5 stars"The fear is for what is still to be lost."
By Jill I. Shtulman TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on November 14, 2011
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
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.Read more ›
7 Comments 15 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
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3.0 out of 5 starsAn Uneven Evensong
By Smith's Rock on December 2, 2011
Format: Hardcover
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.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 starsI love Joan Didion and will continue to read her writing ...

I love Joan Didion and will continue to read her writing because she gives a calm, distilled perspective I otherwise would not see. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Lizzy Landrace
5.0 out of 5 starsDo give this book a try

This is a wrenching story. Every woman will find pieces of her experience here. I am a big fan.

Published 1 month ago by G. R. Pearson
5.0 out of 5 starssad book.

good book but depressing.

Published 1 month ago by rebecca dekalb
5.0 out of 5 starsThe mind still remembers, what the body can no longer accomplish

If you like Joan Didion, you will not be disappointed by Blue Nights. Writing about the death of her daughter, her only child, a few short years after the unexpected death of her... Read more

Published 2 months ago by Cristina Moon
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Great book, excellent condition!

Published 3 months ago by candice lamere
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Wonderful. Didion always is.

Published 3 months ago by Anonymous
4.0 out of 5 starsStaying contact with her inner self

I think her story was a cathartic activity that allowed Joan Didion to get on with her life.

Published 3 months ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsOnce I started this book - could not put it ...

Once I started this book - could not put it down. It is very moving and so well written - that I turned around and read it again.

Published 4 months ago by Carolyn D. Vellar
5.0 out of 5 starsbut beautifully written

disturbing, but beautifully written

Published 4 months ago by Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars... all the quality writing I would expect so very disappointed. Would...

Not at all the quality writing I would expect so very disappointed. Would not recommend - "a lightweight read".

Published 6 months ago by Therese A. Castellani

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