Didion, Joan. Blue nights. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

Memoir can be strong stuff. Joan Didion spares us little in this reliving of her late daughter’s life, the death coming just a year and a half after husband John Gregory Dunne’s sudden demise. She detailed the process of mourning Dunne’s death in The Year of Magical Thinking for which she won a National Book Award. That wrenching and wonderful book was published just after her daughter’s death. Except perhaps for small news articles, few knew at the time of this latest bereavement.

Now she writes with more perspective, five years having past since Quintana Roo Dunne Michael’s death. With perspective but no less loss. Didion chooses the same slow elegiac pace she used in Year, weaving incidents from the present, the recent past, the past, into a mosaic of the life the Dunnes lived and that she now seeks to understand. It was a privileged life, filled with literary personalities, agents, movie and stage directors, producers, travel for work, fine hotels. The kind of life they lived before and after Quintana’s adoption as a week-old infant. Didion now looks back at the happy child and the increasingly troubled teen and adult and examines with questions she can’t possibly answer how she and John could have done things differently. What were they thinking raising this child in a world far too sophisticated for her, far too fast-paced, into which she adapted so well and maybe under the duress of love? They were all happy, they were all fulfilled, they were famous in their way and successful. Wasn’t Quintana a part of this? Why did she not hear what she hears now, the childhood boogie-man whom Quintana announces that she just refused to let bother her “after the age of five.” What child can do this Didion wonders. Most of the book then concerns not so much a guilt trip, but serious thought about the past, an attempt to be realistic about events maybe too long unexamined. Of late, Didion cannot be accused of a lack of self-examination.

Much has been written of Didion’s long ruminations here on her own health and fears for survival as an old woman whose family is gone. These few long passages seem relevant in the context of her long experience with the medical era we live in with its miraculous promises, scrubbed and polished language, and lack of human honesty. She survives several serious incidents in the course of writing this book, incidents which she slyly relates to the ultimate losing battle to save Quintana from a mysterious malady that no one can diagnose or reverse.

Much too has been written of her use of repetitive language. It’s more helpful to think of this technique as lamentation. Parts of the narrative become catch phrases; parts of sentences are repeated instead of using pronouns or other stand-ins. When she succeeds with this is when the reader begins to hear the necessity of repeating the words, the phrases, telling us that these words and phrases tether her, make it possible for her to go on telling this mother’s story, trying to get to the bottom of her failure, trying to know if it was failure or just life. Trying to place the blame. Or not.

Joan Didion is a familiar American literary figure at the end of a long and successful career. Nowhere here, however, does she plead that her story is unique. Particular but not unique. Her story becomes the universal one of parent and child and the consequences of the reversal of generational death. While this can be a harrowing read, it is one with courage as its ultimate theme: the courage to face what is and to examine it so that peace can come.