Blue Nights

A Memoir

By: Joan Didion

Narrated by: Kimberly Farr

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century

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.

Right in the feels

This is the saddest, most beautiful book I’ve read. I still haven’t read all of Joan Didion’s works, but it would be hard to top this one.

Genius

There’s no one like Joan- her depth and insights are incomparable 💜 and this is a particularly deep exploration of life aging and death

Moving to hear thoughts, feelings of great writer

Would you listen to Blue Nights again? Why?

Yes. I will listen to it again.

What does Kimberly Farr bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Pauses. Time to let thoughts sink in.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

No more emotional than Didion's thoughts themselves, which, by their starkness, are moving. Often through their repetition.

Any additional comments?

Waiting for the next writings by Joan Didion.

Joan Didion's writings on grief are masterful.

Didion's years as a journalist have culminated in two invaluable works on how we experience loss and grief. This book and The Year of Magical Thinking were both must reads.

I can't believe I had never heard of her

I finished 2 of her books in 2 days. What an amazing writer, so talented. She had such a full life and her share of grief. She wrote this candid book as a tribute to her daughter and about herself struggling with aging at the age of 75 and it is so perfectly articulated. I want to read more of what she's written but I think I need to take a break for now - these 2 books wiped me out.