● Book Review: The Magic of the Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Ariana Mah Editor in Chief

There are the rare books that you begin, knowing they will without a doubt bring you to tears. Rarer still are those which captivate you to the point that you look up after a period of time, and find that you have finished the entire thing in one go. Blue Nights, written by the late Joan Didion (1934-2021), is one of those few texts that fulfilled both sets of criteria for me. Even before the pandemic, I had multiple works by Joan Didion on my tobe-read list, including The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Play It as It Lays (1970). But early on in 2022, when browsing the bookstore stacks, I was drawn in by the cool tones of the cover design and the synopsis of Blue Nights. This marked my first purchase of a Didion text. On a quiet morning train ride from Toronto to Montréal, armed with a lukewarm coffee and a very heavy suitcase, I sped through the book’s 180-something pages with reckless abandon. Upon finishing, I took a deep breath and looked out the window at the blurring landscape; I needed time to process what I had just read, for what a masterpiece it had been.

Published in 2011, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights is a testament to a mother’s love, and the feelings of loss that never fade, even nearly a decade after the fact. Inspired by her feelings after the loss of her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, just two years after the death of her husband, the memoir weaves a web of thick emotion over the reader, a representation of the fog that Didion found herself in during the months following the loss of her family. Each chapter covers a multitude of themes to varying degrees, including childhood, parenting, family, aging, sickness, death, and grief. Also discussed are Didion’s own experiences with misconceptions and memory, nostalgia as a rose-tinted lens, and the difference between the acts of living and just surviving. Melancholic, chilling, poignant and hopeful all at once, Blue Nights provokes contemplation and reflection about our own choices, and the ways in which we cope with the situations we find ourselves in. In Chapter 7, Didion discusses memory from a perspective that many may be in agreement with. After hearing well-meaning people refer to memories as a form of solace, she writes that, instead, “[m]emories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.” (p. 64) This is true, as while memories are often looked upon in a positive light, as something to look back on, they can actually hold a lot of pain for those closest to the situation. A cult-classic film with the theme of memories as a difficult thing to bear after a negative experience is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), a film that focuses on the main characters’ choice to remove their memories of one another and start anew after a breakup. Memories can be both healing and traumatic, and in Didion’s case, the memories of the family she had lost were the latter. Moving and brilliant, Blue Nights lives up to the rave reviews it has received, and even surpasses them, in my opinion. If you’re looking for a wistful, pensive read for the moody autumn weather, look no further; this thought-provoking memoir will go well with a cozy perch, a rainy day, and a hot drink, as you look out over the downpour during reading breaks.

Photo par amazon.co.uk