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| Author: Joan Didion |
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| Format: | Hardcover |
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Product Summary
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House Inc
ISBN-10: 0307267679
ISBN-13: 9780307267672
Buy.com Sku: 219605653
Publish Date: 11/1/2011
Pages:
208
See more in Personal Memoirs
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From the Publisher:
In her first book since The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion has now written with stunning frankness about her daughter, Quintana Roo, as well as thoughts and fears about having children and about growing old. Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were missed or perhaps displaced. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that follow the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—is a book that is not only haunting but profoundly moving. |
Author Bio
Joan Didion
Joan Didion attended the University of California at Berkeley and then moved to New York. She was an editor at Vogue until 1963, when she became a published writer. She married John Gregory Dunne in 1964 and began to collaborate with him on screenplays. They lived in California for many years--where their daughter Quintana Roo was born in 1966--but eventually settled in New York City.
"[R]aw and unsettling, a meandering meditation rather than a polished version of events. Few will find comfort here....Yet, with her poignant description of a much-loved little girl who grew up to be a troubled but still cherished woman, Ms. Dididon has created something luminous amid her self-recrimination and sorrow. It's her final gift to her daughter--one that only she could give."
- Clare McHugh
11/02/2001
"Didion is triangulating, positioning herself, commenting on the inability of narrative to sustain us even as she invokes it just the same. Or, as she puts it, surrounded by all her familiar photographs: ?I didn't think I'd get through this book. But I did. You always do.'"
- David L. Ulin
10/30/2011
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In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nucl
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