Blue Nights: Equally Blue Days

By Victoria Looseleaf

Joan Didion, we feel your pain. And it is searing, as losing a child always is. Mercifully, though, Didion’s latest book on grief and loss, Blue Nights (Alfred A. Knopf), is short, because it’s doubtful we could emotionally handle a War and Peace-sized tome about this gifted writer’s pain, universal as it is. (Didion has, after all, been called a “connoisseur of catastrophe,” most recently by author John Banville in his New York Times review of the book.)

Lately, though, Didion’s pain has become a cottage industry. After the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne (he had a heart attack at the end of 2003), the writer poured her grief into an astonishing memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. Published in 2005 (also by Knopf), the international bestseller went on to win a National Book Award. (So, too, did Patti Smith last year for Just Kids, click here to read our take on that). Thinking then morphed into a one-person Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave as Didion (above, with the author), running for some 144 performances in 2007. But between Dunne’s death and the Broadway show, the couple’s 39-year old adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, died in 2005 from acute pancreatitis.

What are we to glean from these works, notably Blue, in which the author makes use of a bare bones, declarative structure and speaks directly to the reader? Moving back and forth in time, including chronicling the family’s early days in starry Malibu (above), Dunne’s death and the devastating loss of Quintana, the book is also a treatise on aging, albeit aging with and around privilege. As Didion and Dunne were both multi-talented writers, including penning screenplays (among them: The Panic in Needle Park – Yo, Al Pacino [for our take on Al’s most recent movie, The Son of No One, click here]; Play It As It Lays; and A Star is Born, the 1976 version with Stresiand and Kristofferson), Didion talks about taking Quintana with them on shoots, to hotel rooms, to places far from the madding crowd, so to speak, unless you call the Hollywood crowd madding, which, when you think about it, it surely is, leaving them in the thick of things.

Ah, the peripatetic life. Their life. A unit. A Family. In truth, a celebrity family, even though writers are generally considered the low peeps on a Tinseltown totem pole. But consider this: We learn that Quintana Roo, immediately after being adopted, was taken from the downtown L.A. courthouse to lunch at the Bistro in Beverly Hills.

And one of her christening dresses was a gift from Chanel-clad Connie Wald, the by-then widow of famous producer Jerry Wald (Mildred Pierce, Key Largo, the Cary Grant–Deborah Kerr love duo of An Affair to Remember are among his many flicks. An aside: We knew Connie Wald through the late Ivan Moffat – click here for our remembrances of him – whose best man at Moffat’s second wedding was Dominick Dunne, the late brother of John Gregory Dunne. The circle remains unbroken; six degrees of separation, though we understand that is now down to 4 and some change…).

But we digress: Designer labels, from Porthault (usually linens, in this case a parasol) and Christian Louboutin (the red-soled shoes Quintana wore at her wedding), to David Webb jewelry, accommodations at the Ritz and a Payard cake, are all sprinkled liberally throughout (as are the words “depression” and “fear”). Are we to think of these deluxe brands as some kind of catalyctic emotional deadeners, for this is a book about inconsolability? Or are we made to feel better about ourselves, as none of the talent, privilege and connections the Didion-Dunne family had/have, could ultimately spare them from tragedy.

In the end, though, nobody is spared from tragedy. It’s how we deal with it that matters. Didion deals with it in words, some of which include “maintaining momentum,” her notion of keeping going (book tours and the like), even at the cost of declining health. And then there is her unique view of, well, the past: “Memories are what you no longer want to remember,” she writes.

This is tough stuff for some to reconcile; others might become frustrated with her highly stylized approach to life and death. Be that as it may, Blue Nights, in the end not as stunning or piercing as Magical Thinking, can be, if not a cuddly companion on a chilly evening when one wants to muck about in the morass of the inevitable – can be more like spending a bit of quality time with a singular mind. For Joan Didion, now frail and admitting that writing “no longer comes easily to me,” is always worth reading. Indeed, we’re sorry for your loss, Joan, but however slight or skewed the writing comes, we’re still grateful it does.

To further your Didion experience, why not revisit some of her earlier works, such as the non-fiction tome from 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, or the fictional, A Book of Common Prayer, from 1977?