Blue Nights - Hardcover

Didion, Joan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307267679 ISBN 13: 9780307267672

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2011

Synopsis

From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.

Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.

Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.

About this title

Review:

‘With Blue Nights, named for the intense and portentous beauty of the dying light, Ms Didion has translated the sad hum of her thoughts onto a profound mediation on mortality. The result aches with wisdom’ Economist

‘Searingly honest about the extended nightmare of losing a child’ Financial Times

‘Memory is the subject of her latest book, Blue Nights; its power and its pain and, in Didion’s recollection of her now lost motherhood and marriage, its shimmering, unreachable beauty... she shows us, without hope but finally unafraid, that all days must end’ The Times

‘One of the supreme observers of American life’ Daily Express

‘The relentless questions betray a palpable strain, Didion is aware of this- it’s part of the book’s point. It’s searing mainly for what this venerated US writer hasn’t been able to put into words’ Metro

‘like nothing else Didon has written... Yet how else could she write such a book, in such a moment?... Lays bare an anguish that that infects her every waking moment’ New Statesman

‘This is an honest and sympathetic study of bereavement, bereft of self pity, a genuine search for an answer to an imponderable question’ Jeffery Taylor, Sunday Express

‘a searing poignancy...there is something epic about the scale of Joan Didion’s misfortune...[Blue Nights] has an indomitable quality: a steely willingness to recollect past happiness in present adversity – the deepest of all sorrows, according to Dante – which it is impossible not to admire.’ Jane Shilling, Daily Telegraph

About the Author:

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California, and now lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and eight previous books of nonfiction. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published by Everyman's Library in 2006.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0307267679
• ISBN 13: 9780307267672
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 188