Shelving: Blue Nights

It might sound presumptuous, but Joan Didion was the sole reason I got into writing, specifically her essay "On Keeping a Notebook." Writers on writing can be vainglorious, peering into their own navels a little too much, but she wrote so beautifully and sparsely about the craft of writing -- the prickly little bits that are often unglamourous -- that it chipped away some of those grand notions I'd previously had about writing. And I'm forever grateful for it.

In the spate of a few years, Didion lost both her husband and her only daughter, Quintana Roo. The Year of Magical Thinking, which was published in 2006, was written about her husband, John Gregory Dunne's sudden death, and Blue Nights is a companion piece of sorts about her daughter's. I hesitate to call this a eulogy, since she leaves so many questions unanswered (more about that later). In the elegantly spare prose she is famous for, memories of her daughter are interspersed with musings on aging and Didion's own mortality . It's not so much about loss as it is haunted by it.

How Quintana actually died is something of a mystery. All we're really given is that she'd been hospitalized with a long illness, and it's caused some controversy:

Everyone's clear that she died. But was it pneumonia, septicemia, a virus, an infection, a viral infection, a cerebral hemorrhage, or acute pancreatitis? A certain amount of confusion is probably inevitable: Quintana was ill for nine months, and was hospitalized numerous times for various conditions, from which complications then arose. And the book is a memoir, not a medical play-by-play. But Didion doesn't help matters by being herself extremely vague. The words "acute pancreatitis" do not appear in Blue Nights. Neither does "pancreatitis" alone. Nor does "septicemia," "septic," or "sepsis." There are no search results for "pneumonia." The words "cerebral hemorrhage" do appear, once — in reference not to Quintana, but to Didion's grandmother, who died of one at age 75. (source)

 In the end, I don't think it matters much that Didion isn't being as transparent as some would like. It doesn't take away from the beauty of the book which, first and foremost, was written by a grieving mother. I don't think she "owes" it to the reader to spill her guts when she is clearly still processing her daughter's death.