BOOK REVIEW
Book Review: Joan Didion’s Blue Nights
**REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS**
This was my first Joan Didion book and I went in knowing next to nothing about her life. It was nice to approach a book with no knowledge other than what the book summary provided. During reading, I gave no head nods or had any thoughts like, ‘yes, this reminds me of her previous work.’ It’s interesting that the universe threw this book in my path as my first Didion. Well, it could be that it was one of the few ebooks available for checkout in my town’s underfunded library, but that’s another post. Blue Nights is often referred to as a companion piece to The Year of Magical Thinking. I wonder if I would have found this spare memoir as powerful if I had read the previous book. Probably not.
Short Summary
The memoir follows Didion’s thoughts about her own aging which spur a reckoning of her only child’s death. She describes her frustrating encounters with doctors who patronize her because she is an older woman, but all of her experiences and memories circle around mortality: her own and her daughters. If the reader is unaware of Didion’s daughter’s death before starting the book, they become aware very quickly. All of Didion’s experiences somehow hold a connection to her daughter’s life and the agony of her…
