Blue Nights
Joan Didion's companion to The Year of Magical Thinking turns from the death of her husband to the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo, who fell ill on her wedding day and died less than two years later. Written in Didion's late-style fragments, the book moves between summer evenings in Malibu, hospital corridors at New York Cornell, the practical questions of adoption, and the failing body of the writer at seventy-five. Blue Nights is in part a meditation on what we mean when we say we want children and on the particular terror of outliving them. It is also Didion thinking, with characteristic precision, about her own aging, her own falling, and the writer's eternal compulsion to find the right word for an experience that was supposed to be unspeakable.
What you might want to know about Blue Nights
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Joan Didion writes about her adopted daughter Quintana Roo, who died not long after Didion's husband. A short, careful memoir about adoption, motherhood, illness, aging, and what aging robs from a writer.
Blue Nights was written by Joan Didion and published in 2011. It is a memoir about the death of her daughter Quintana Roo, written as a companion piece to The Year of Magical Thinking, which dealt with the death of her husband.
Reading The Year of Magical Thinking first is helpful because Blue Nights references it directly. The two books form a connected pair on grief and aging, though each works on its own.
Blue Nights is 542 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Blue Nights takes most readers 8 to 12 hours to finish.
Blue Nights is a standalone novel by Heather Graham, not part of a series.
Blue Nights is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
