Blue Nights A Memoir

A New York Times Notable Book

Incantatory.... A beautiful condolence note to humanity about some of the painful realities of the human condition. The Washington Post

Heartbreaking.... A searing inquiry into loss and a melancholy mediation on mortality and time. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Joan Didion is a brilliant observer, a powerful thinker, a writer whose work has been central to the times in which she has lived. Blue Nights continues her legacy. The Boston Globe

Exemplary...provocative.... [Didion] comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art. John Banville, The New York Times Book Review

A beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy.... What appears on the surface to be an elegantly, intelligently, deeply felt, precisely written story of the loss of a beloved child is actually an elegantly, intelligently, deeply felt, precisely written glimpse into the abyss, a book that forces us to understand, to admit, that there can be no preparation for tragedy, no protection from it, and so, finally, no consolation. The New York Review of Books

Profoundly moving.... This is first and last a meditation on mortality. San Francisco Chronicle

Ms. Didion has translated the sad hum of her thoughts into a profound meditation on mortality. The result aches with a wisdom that feels dreadfully earned. The Economist

For the great many of us who cherish Joan Didion, who can never get enough of her voice and her brilliant, fragile, endearing, pitiless persona, [Blue Nights] is a gift. Newsday

Exquisite.... She applies the same rigorous standards of research and meticulous observation to her own life that she expects from herself in journalism. And to get down to the art of what she does, her sense of form is as sharp as a glass-cutter s, and her sentences fold back on themselves and come out singing in a way that other writers can only wonder at and envy. The Washington Independent Review of Books

Ms. Didion has created something luminous amid her self-recrimination and sorrow. It s her final gift to her daughter one that only she could give. Wall Street Journal

Didion s bravest work. It is a bittersweet look back at what she s lost, and an unflinching assessment of what she has left. BookPage

Yes, this is a book about aging and about loss. Mostly, though, it is about what one parent and child shared and what all parents and children share, the intimacy of what bring you closer and what splits you apart.

Haunting. Entertainment Weekly

Breathtaking.... With harrowing honesty and mesmerizing style, Didion chronicles the tragic death of her daughter, Quintana, interwoven with memories of their happier days together and Didion s own meditations on aging. Newsweek

Darkly riveting.... The cumulative effect of watching her finger her recollections like beads on a rosary is unexpectedly instructive. None of us can escape death, but Blue Nights shows how Didion has, with the devastating force of her penetrating mind, learned to simply abide. Elle

In this supremely tender work of memory, Didion is paradoxically insistent that as long as one person is condemned to remember, there can still be pain and loss and anguish. Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair

Didion s latest memoir unflinchingly reflects on old age and the tragedy of her daughter s death.
Best New Paperbacks, Entertainment Weekly