Ms. Didion's heartbreaking new book…is at once a loving portrait of Quintana and a mother's conflicted effort to grapple with her grief through words: the medium the author has used throughout her life to try to make sense of the senseless. It is a searing inquiry into loss and a melancholy meditation on mortality and time.
—The New York Times

Blue Nights is a devastating companion volume to Magical Thinking, a beautiful condolence note to humanity about some of the painful realities of the human condition that deserves to be printed on traditional black-bordered mourning stationery…The marvel of Blue Nights is that its 76-year-old, matchstick-frail author has found the strength to articulate her deepest fears—which are fears we can all relate to.
—The Washington Post

[Blue Nights], no less than [The Year of Magical Thinking], is honest, unflinching, necessarily solipsistic and, in the way of these things, self-lacerating…Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, [Blue Nights] is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life's worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.
—The New York Times Book Review

Loss has pursued author Didion relentlessly, and in this subtly crushing memoir about the untimely death of her daughter, Quintana Roo (1966–2005), coming on the heels of The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicled the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion again turns face forward to the harsh truth. “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children,” she writes, groping her way backward through painful memories of Quintana Roo’s life, from her recent marriage in 2003 to adorable moments of childhood moving about California in the 1970s with her worldly parents and learning early on cues about how to grow up fast. While her parents were writing books, working on location for movies, and staying in fancy hotels, Quintana Roo developed “depths and shallows,” as her mother depicts in her elliptically dark fashion, later diagnosed as “borderline personality disorder”; while Didion does not specify what exactly caused Quintana’s repeated hospitalizations and coma at the end of her life, the author seems to suggest it was a kind of death wish, about which Didion feels guilt, not having heeded the signs early enough. Her own health—she writes at age 75—is increasingly frail, and she is obsessed with falling down and being an invalid. Yet Didion continually demonstrates her keen survival instincts, and her writing is, as ever, truculent and mesmerizing, scrutinizing herself as mercilessly as she stares down death. (Nov.)

Kimberly Farr turns in a solid performance in this audio edition of Didion’s haunting memoir of her daughter Quintana Roo’s illness and death. The book is a sequel of sorts to Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking—about the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne—and this previous work haunts Blue Nights and helps to guide Farr’s narration. A younger woman than the author, Farr’s reading often lacks the mournful quality of the text: her narration is simply perkier than Didion’s prose. And while Farr does justice to the author’s story—using the elongation of precisely chosen words to indicate untapped reservoirs of emotion—there are times when the reading takes on a tone more appropriate to a less rigorous story of uplift through death. A Knopf hardcover. (Nov.)

A New York Times Notable Book

“Incantatory.... A beautiful condolence note to humanity about some of the painful realities of the human condition.” —The Washington Post
 
“Heartbreaking.... A searing inquiry into loss and a melancholy mediation on mortality and time.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
 
“Joan Didion is a brilliant observer, a powerful thinker, a writer whose work has been central to the times in which she has lived. Blue Nights continues her legacy.” —The Boston Globe

“Exemplary...provocative.... [Didion] comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.” —John Banville, The New York Times Book Review
 
“A beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy.... What appears on the surface to be an elegantly, intelligently, deeply felt, precisely written story of the loss of a beloved child is actually an elegantly, intelligently, deeply felt, precisely written glimpse into the abyss, a book that forces us to understand, to admit, that there can be no preparation for tragedy, no protection from it, and so, finally, no consolation.” —The New York Review of Books
 
“Profoundly moving.... This is first and last a meditation on mortality.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Ms. Didion has translated the sad hum of her thoughts into a profound meditation on mortality. The result aches with a wisdom that feels dreadfully earned.” —The Economist
 
“For the great many of us who cherish Joan Didion, who can never get enough of her voice and her brilliant, fragile, endearing, pitiless persona, [Blue Nights] is a gift.” —Newsday
 
“Exquisite.... She applies the same rigorous standards of research and meticulous observation to her own life that she expects from herself in journalism. And to get down to the art of what she does, her sense of form is as sharp as a glass-cutter’s, and her sentences fold back on themselves and come out singing in a way that other writers can only wonder at and envy.” —The Washington Independent Review of Books
 
“Ms. Didion has created something luminous amid her self-recrimination and sorrow. It’s her final gift to her daughter—one that only she could give.” —Wall Street Journal

“Didion’s bravest work. It is a bittersweet look back at what she’s lost, and an unflinching assessment of what she has left.” —BookPage
 
“Yes, this is a book about aging and about loss. Mostly, though, it is about what one parent and child shared—and what all parents and children share, the intimacy of what bring you closer and what splits you apart.” —Oprah.com
 
“Haunting.” —Entertainment Weekly
 
“Breathtaking.... With harrowing honesty and mesmerizing style, Didion chronicles the tragic death of her daughter, Quintana, interwoven with memories of their happier days together and Didion’s own meditations on aging.” —Newsweek
 
“Darkly riveting.... The cumulative effect of watching her finger her recollections like beads on a rosary is unexpectedly instructive. None of us can escape death, but Blue Nights shows how Didion has, with the devastating force of her penetrating mind, learned to simply abide.” —Elle
 
“In this supremely tender work of memory, Didion is paradoxically insistent that as long as one person is condemned to remember, there can still be pain and loss and anguish.” —Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair

“Didion’s latest memoir unflinchingly reflects on old age and the tragedy of her daughter’s death.”
—Best New Paperbacks, Entertainment Weekly

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion wrote about her reaction to the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Here she addresses the death shortly thereafter of her 39-year-old daughter, Quintana, who died of complications from pneumonia. Adopted at birth and apprised of this at a young age, Quintana had feelings of abandonment her entire life. Didion wonders here whether her handling of her daughter's early years contributed to those feelings and generally questions her suitability as a parent. At the same time, she discusses her own attempts to cope with aging and the onset of frailty. Didion's spare style of writing gets right to the point. She ponders Quintana's utterances and writings to try to better understand her and how she herself might have responded differently, but ultimately, there are no answers. VERDICT This worthwhile meditation on parenting and aging by a succinct writer, while at times difficult to read and a bit self-centered, is well worth the emotional toll. [See Prepub Alert, 5/2/11.]—Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences Lib., Philadelphia

Just 20 months after her husband died of a sudden heart attack, best-selling essayist Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking) had to face the death of her only daughter, Quintana Roo, after a long illness. This poignant and touching memoir explores her feelings about loss, motherhood, and her own aging as well as Quintana's life. VERDICT While more rambling and repetitive than her earlier work, Blue Nights reveals flashes of Didion's brilliant style as she conveys the terrible pain of losing a child. Kimberly Farr reads with a warmth and clarity that avoids sentimentality. This book will appeal to Didion's fans and to those coping with the loss of a loved one. ["This worthwhile mediation on parenting and aging by a succinct writer...is well worth the emotional toll," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Knopf hc, LJ 9/15/11; see Major Audio Releases, LJ 9/15/11.—Ed.]—Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

Kimberly Farr finds a voice for Didion that reflects a sense of detachment from the events of her daughter’s life and, in particular, her daughter’s illness and death. Didion talks about the places they traveled and lived and the celebrities they spent their time with when her daughter was young. Didion’s reflections on her daughter and their relationship are an examination of her own difficulties adjusting to growing older, losing her husband (the subject of THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING), and losing a child. Running throughout the book is a subtext of despair regarding her own mortality. Farr’s narration is haunting, but she keeps the sober tone of the book at a distance; thus, it does not overwhelm. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Didion (We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, 2006, etc.) delivers a second masterpiece on grief, considering both her daughter's death and her inevitable own.

In her 2005 book,The Year of Magical Thinking, the much-decorated journalist laid bare her emotions following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The same year that book was published, she also lost her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, after a long hospitalization. Like Magical Thinking, this bookis constructed out of close studies of particular memories and bits of medical lingo. Didion tests Quintana's childhood poems and scribblings for hints of her own failings as a mother, and she voices her helplessness at the hands of doctors. "I put the word 'diagnosis' in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a 'diagnosis' led to a 'cure,' " she writes. The author also ponders her own mortality, and she does so with heartbreaking specificity. A metal folding chair, as she describes it, is practically weaponized, ready to do her harm should she fall out of it; a fainting spell leaves her bleeding and helpless on the floor of her bedroom. Didion's clipped, recursive sentences initially make the book feel arid and emotionally distant. But she's profoundly aware of tone and style—a digression about novel-writing reveals her deep concern for the music sentences make—and the chapters become increasingly freighted with sorrow without displaying sentimentality. The book feels like an epitaph for both her daughter and herself, as she considers how much aging has demolished her preconceptions about growing old.

A slim, somber classic.