Blue Night by Joan Didion

This is a raw, untidy, ragged book. Well, grief is all of those things. On the other hand, Didion wrote about the death of her husband in an iconic memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking, which apart from being raw was none of them. So she knows how it can be done.  That book was about the horribly sudden death of her husband, about shock and pain and then the confusion of bereavement and loss. But it was also a vivid portrait of the man himself.

‘One never knows when the blow may fall’, yet people have been surprisingly surprised that it fell again so quickly on Didion, when her adopted daughter Quintana, also died, a year later. But blows rain down relentlessly, not to say unfairly, on some individuals. Such as Job. Such as my blithely happy friend who then lost her teenage middle son, husband, and teenage younger son all very suddenly, within two years. It happens. That death is no respecter of persons should be obvious, but isn’t always.

If we were given a memoir not only of the death of Didion’s husband but of his life, his personality in The Year of Magical Thinking, we are not really given one of Quintana Roo — named after a place they found on a map — who remains a curiously unformed and shadowy figure throughout. Was this intentional? Did Didion realise that this is how her book would be? Why is it a portrait not of Quintana at all but of Didion herself, of her grief, and also of her accompanying terror of old age?

I ask these questions because her book is full of questions, almost composed of them. She cannot make any sense of death and grief and old age, or relate them to life and the past, so she asks endless unanswerable questions.