Joan Didion, _Blue Nights_

 [This is my 118th post of the year. My previous highest annual total was 86 (in 2013 and again in 2018), which I passed back in July. One of those 2020 silver linings, I suppose--more time to read, more time to blog. I also noticed I passed 100,000 views this year--not all that many, considering how old the blog is, not to mention that 85% of this views were likely by Russian trolls, but still, it feels noteworthy.]

THIS CAME OUT in 2011, which is when I purchased it. I have not read it until now, however, even though I admire Didion immensely, and I know exactly why. 

I have a fine recording of Gustav Mahler's Songs on the Deaths of Children that I stopped playing while the kids were growing up because...well, in a word, because of superstition. It just seemed to be asking for trouble. I played it again once they had grown up and moved out, but soon there were grandkids, and I haven't played it since the first was born.

So, knowing this book was about the death of Didion's daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in her thirties, and knowing it would be an extraordinarily powerful and moving book, again I thought...why ask for trouble? Why draw the evil eye by reading a  book about the death of an adult child?

Then, after reading Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, which reminded me forcefully enough of Didion's strengths that I wished I had a new one of hers to read, I thought...well, there's Blue Nights.

So I read it. A staggering book. About fear, we might say. 

The fear, for one, that parents acquire as soon as they become parents, that something might happen, that you have to be mentally prepare for any threat or danger that might ever come near your child, ready to confront it and overcome it, whatever it is. 

For another, children's fears, fears of abandonment or or all sorts of bogeymen, which are amplified in Quintana's case as an adopted child who had to wonder why her birth parents had chosen to give her up. Or fears of what might have happened had Didion and John Gregory Dunne not been available to answer the call of the doctor who phoned to say there was an available baby girl.

Then, the fears of having a loved one fall ill, and none of the qualified and certified medical professionals to whom we entrust our loved ones and ourselves having any idea of what is happening. The fear of hospitals.

Then the fear of death--Didion was in her seventies when she wrote the book and in the course of writing it has a fainting episode and some lapses of memory. These lapses are particularly frightening--now that all she has of her husband and daughter are memories, what if these too come under the erasure of age? What if she loses everything?

It's not a consolatory book. It's cold and clear-eyed, as Didion always is, but as always in Didion, the cool and the clarity somehow intensify the radiance of the passion.