I'VE NEVER SEEN a blue night. They don’t have them in L.A. or as Joan Didion refers to it, “subtropical California.” But they do occur in New York “as April ends and May begins, a change in the season…”
She goes on to say in the introduction to her new memoir Blue Nights:
The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming,” the glimmer, the glisten, the glamour — carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.
She has not lost her ability to turn a phrase into a lilting stanza that runs almost like a bass line throughout the book. The introduction ends with the sentence, “Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.” I’m not sure I know what this means, but I hope I never see blue nights.
Blue Nights is not a sequel to
The Year of Magical Thinking, as much as it is an extension of it — the terrible two years after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, when her daughter (her somewhat famous daughter Quintana Roo, a name you could never forget, a name that in itself feels magical) fell into a kind of semi-conscious state induced by an infection that turned into septicemia (I think — it’s not really clearly exactly what occurred), except that it spiraled into a condition which resulted in Quintana Roo’s tragic, untimely death and the unthinkable state of a blue night. Or the unthinkable state of what occurs after a blue night wanes.
Relentless and riveting. Relentless — so that you are forced to put it down for a moment and walk away in the hope that you can stop yourself from the mood, so raw on the page that it infuses you. And then compelled to walk back because the voice is so powerful that it refuses to let its (or this) reader go.
It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoleon Bonaparte said that.
What greater grief can there be for mortals then to see their children dead. Euripedes said that.
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
I said that.
And later in that same early chapter of
Blue Nights, she repeats:
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
and adds:
I just said that but what does it mean?
I don’t know if I know what it means either, but I sort of know what she means.
Writers often revisit themes in their work, refine plot lines, almost as if they’re dancers performing a more sophisticated version of an earlier piece, this time set to a slightly different tune. In Didion’s case, the reflections themselves, the easy passage of time from present tense to a recollection, have become an imbedded flagstone of her work. In A Book of Common Prayer andBlue Nights — both so much about reflection and memory &...
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