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

Not for Sissies

As a screenwriter, Joan Didion and her husband wrote the script for "Play it as it Lays." As a widow, she tells it like it is in her memoir of loss and aging, "Blue Nights." This is not an easy book to read, and not for those who decry negative thinking and believe in the magic of medicine. Didion knows better, and in her spare, carefully chosen words describes the process of unrecoverable diminishment and death in a way no one else has dared. No sentimentality, no upbeat insistence, just the truth. Those who enjoyed Didion in her prime, and in theirs, will find that this book speaks to them with stunning honesty.

Read it in a day I liked it so much.

What made the experience of listening to Blue Nights the most enjoyable?

I loved the writing and the tale.

What did you like best about this story?

I believed it.

Which character – as performed by Kimberly Farr – was your favorite?

The mother.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The relationship between the mother and her daughter was painful and powerful all at the same time.

Any additional comments?

If you like Joan Didian, you'll like this book.

Solipsism

Although Joan’s story is her solipsistic POV, the personal is the universal. I found the story annoyingly self-aggrandizing, full of A-list references, but very moving, nevertheless. Her prose is satisfying.