usually when i read works by Joan Didion, i read her as involved but unexcited, and bitter about the state of a great deal, instead of the anxieties that are often used to describe her writing. maybe i’d been misreading it all and wasn’t able to see it anywhere except where she was overt about it. Blue Nights was littered with that anxiety. it was palpable and it hurt to read sometimes. the prevalent of the writing is the mourning of her daughter’s death, Quintana Roo. the dominant subject is Didion herslef. the only constants throughout the book are the events, and Didion; events are presented anachronistically and there are a great deal of divergences that lead to Didion writing about aging and her own ailments; even though she writes about here daughter, it is to talk about her current condition, especially in the way it has changed since the past. there is a looming sadness in the writing about Quintana as she brings up the memories that are distinct and she believes define her relationship to her daughter. nearly all of those memories emphasize the fears she retrospectively has about the quality of her parenting as she plays detective with the small pieces of Quintana’s legacy. each memory of her daughter holds one or two focal junctures that could be made of a sentence someone says or a revelation Didion has, that comes up repetitively throughout the rest of the book. the writing performs entirely against a sentiment (one of the repeated phrases) by her daughter: “when someone dies, don’t dwell on it.” it winds up being exactly what Didion does, dwelling.
she has compared herself to a musician before, or has put her writing along side metaphors of composing music. “Grammar is a piano I play by ear,” she has said. Didion returns to the metaphor in a chapter, which could also be called a verse when it comes to her writing, where she describes the writing technique she could use when she was younger: there was a general stroke of words describing the intended action of the sentence and afterwards she would fill in the blank pieces of her perfect, algorithm-like, phrases. i am glad she makes this comparison because i have an easier time talking about her work when i talk about it using musical terms. when i say she uses a phrase i am comparing her string of words to a string of notes, and vice versa. Blue Nights, it is easy to say, makes active use of leitmotif.
throughout her essays, she constantly manages to keep her own writing and opinion’s character by mimicking the character and opinions of the people she encounters. she does that in Blue Nights with the same bitterness that i am used to loving, but the palpable anxiety is clearest when she applies this technique to herself and it amounts to a tautological leitmotif. the repeated phrases amount to the emphasis of traumas and the reminders of time and health that will never be returned. she tries to say that “when we talk about mortality we are talking about our children” but never seems to admit than when she is talking about her child she is talking about her own mortality. things repeat and go on and she dwells and in the end of the book there is no real closure because, in the writing, the mourning which can come to a close is made secondary to the anxieties that have lasted a lifetime and show no signs of changing into anything else and have only grown as the body becomes more frail. when her own body turns on her and she realizes how mortal she has become, so too does the bitter repetition she managed to play by ear with and against the subjects of her work. Didion writes about the way that writing does not come easily to her anymore. she writes about the ailments that are new. there is a passage where she describes not noticing her frailties until they were so prevalent in her life. she writes about the ailments rooted in her youth that are coming back to haunt her now. she does not write about regrets, only worries. she writes as someone who has had time to be a journalist, lover, novelist, mother, playwright , young and old.
Italo Calvino wrote that “You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living.” Blue Nights, as i understood it, is what happened when Didion reached that moment.
the gift and the grain 