Buzz Reviews: Blue Nights, by Joan Didion

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Review by Rachel Syme

When The Year of Magical Thinking appeared in 2005, it established Joan Didion as the high priestess of anointed grief counselors -- her meticulous and minimalist memoir of losing her husband to heart failure hit a cultural and emotional chord that continues to reverberate. In Blue Nights, Didion’s new memoir, she turns to motherhood with a similar clinical detachment -- again a shock, but in this case, one that feels much more uncomfortable. Didion’s gimlet eye is always welcome; the conclusions that she draws from it, maybe less so.

Two months before Magical Thinking's publication, Didion’s 39-year-old adopted daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, died after a battle with pneumonia and brain bleeding. Another beloved figure in her life was dead, and once more Didion chose to process it through writing, this time questioning whether or not she was a good mother. What is troubling to read -- and what will most likely drive the book’s buzz throughout the fall season -- is Didion’s uncompromising conclusion: that she likely never really understood her daughter; that she never gave the girl a chance to blossom into a fully-formed person.

Given the fervor that offbeat parenting memoirs cause today (i.e. Tiger Mother), Didion’s confession that she raised her adopted baby girl “like a doll,” and that she had no concept of changing her life to accommodate the new baby, will likely drive conversations around Blue Nights. When Didion and her husband found out they were getting baby Quintana, they planned a trip to war-torn Vietnam, a trip scuttled by a scheduling conflict, not any sense of danger towards the baby.

She also ignored the signs of Quintanaa’s borderline personality disorder at a young age (at five, the child was already calling mental hospitals to ask for assistance.) Didion notes that even as a girl, Quintana – prone to night terrors and asking big questions about safety, sanity and death – realized her mother’s own inability to relate. “How could she have imagined that I could take care of her? She saw me as needing care myself. She saw me as frail. Was that her anxiety or mine?”

Instead of apologizing for her maternal shortcomings, Didion simply asks the hard questions about parenting, her way of proving that she did love Quintana. She is willing to probe her own failures, willing to ask whether she could have done more, if there might have been a way to save her child from pain, or even death. She also acknowledges the current shift towards a more hands-on parenting approach: “We now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us,” she writes, noting her own flaws in that method.

Blue Nights' emphasis on Didion's own health problems and her acquiescence to finality makes clear she is reaching the end of her career, working through her demons in the best way she knows how. Didion’s great gift as a writer is her precision, but it was a skill that complicated her parental instincts. Blue Nights is indeed beautifully written, but as it gracefully identifies Didion’s pathology, it is also a symptom of it: when a mother is full of sharp questions but no answers, curiosity but little warmth, a child is bound to feel lost. As Didion asks, “When we noticed her confusions, did we consider our own?”

Rachel Syme is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in NPR, Elle, The Daily Beast, and other publications. She is at work on a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham that will be published by Random House.

Knopf   (Fourth Estate in ANZ)
208 pp.
US$25.00
ISBN: 9780307267672
Publication Date: November 1, 2011