Didion's 'Blue Nights'

 Book Beast - Oct 26, 2011 - Lucas Wittmann, books editor at Newsweek/The Daily Beast.

An exclusive clip from Joan Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne’s mesmerizing film of the writer reading from Blue Nights and sharing glimpses of her life.

After years of writing some of the sharpest and most pristine prose, Joan Didion hardly needs an introduction, but readers will find her new memoir, Blue Nights, her most personal work yet. It’s a searing recounting of the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo, and Didion’s own struggles with aging and illness, and a follow up to her bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking. So it seems only fitting that her nephew, actor and director Griffin Dunne (with Susanne Rostock), would at her request turn his camera on her to produce a mesmerizing glimpse of the writer. She can be seen reading from her new work in what Dunne describes as an “audiobook for the eyes” filled with family photos.

Watch a clip from their moving film—which we have reason to hope might lead to a full-scale documentary in the near future.