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  • Blue Nights

  • A Memoir
  • Written by: Joan Didion
  • Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
  • Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (12 ratings)

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Blue Nights cover art

Blue Nights

Written by: Joan Didion
Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
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Publisher's Summary

From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and 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 not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. 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 signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.

©2011 Joan Didion (P)2011 Random House

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Honest and humble

A brave attempt at assimilating a tragic reality. I appreciated Didion’s capacity to face her mistakes and how they may have affected her child. The misunderstandings between love ones are hard to accept let alone expose in a book. She clearly loved her daughter deeply.

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