Extremely moving memoir, well-narrated

I was so moved by this very beautiful memoir. The author tells the story of the loss of her beloved daughter with great intensity and lyrical beauty without an ounce of pity or sentimentality. It has music, rhythm and beautiful images to connect thoughts and emotions directly to the reader and to her experience of loss. This is a profound story of loss and of aging that memorializes the beloved child while connecting to the fading of her own life. I can only say that this book reached directly into my heart and soul and hit me in all of my senses. The author expresses thoughts and feelings with so much power and grace. The reader is excellent and reads with a speed and pace that matches the text and understands its rhythms. Highly recommended.

11 people found this helpful

A touching, revealing tribute

I read this just after finishing The Year of Magical Thinking and enjoyed both very much. The author reveals depths of parental doubt rarely acknowledged by modern parents.

The book contains reminiscences and reflections about the life and death of the author's adopted daughter who died after a prolonged illness in her mid-thirties. They are roughly chronologic, but there does not seem to be a particular meaning to the order of presentation. It feels more like someone pawing through a box of photographs. She paints a vivid picture of her daughter and her loss without being melodramatic or morose. A parent who loses a child is entitled to self-pity, but these moments are brief and poignant.

She discusses both her own difficulties about becoming a parent and her daughter's problems with bipolar disorder and the inevitable baggage of adoption. It is charming to hear how naive and vulnerable Mrs. Didion was about parenting and the passages detailing her daughter's bipolar episodes are heart-wrenching.

The book was very emotionally touching because she includes so many personal details and everyday events that you really feel like a family friend. Somehow, acknowledging so many doubts and flaws makes her not only sympathetic, but also capable--because she is engaging her problems.

The performance is very good. Clear and sincere without being too dramatic.

I would recommend the book to anyone interested in the grieving process or the difficulty of parenting.

6 people found this helpful

terrific book

If you could sum up Blue Nights in three words, what would they be?

Didion makes you live in her skin

Who was your favorite character and why?

Joan Didion is the dominant character in the book. It is through her eyes that you see her daughter, her husband, parents and others of her circle. You feel as much as if you are in her skin as if it was a fictional tale with her being the fictional narrator.

What does Kimberly Farr bring to the story that you wouldn???t experience if you just read the book?

Didion is a great writer. I am sure the book would be excellent in print form. Farr is a very good narrator. I was so sorry that the book was over.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

I think it was the repetition, including the repitition of Quintana's remembered questions of her adoptive mother,

6 people found this helpful

Not for Sissies

As a screenwriter, Joan Didion and her husband wrote the script for "Play it as it Lays." As a widow, she tells it like it is in her memoir of loss and aging, "Blue Nights." This is not an easy book to read, and not for those who decry negative thinking and believe in the magic of medicine. Didion knows better, and in her spare, carefully chosen words describes the process of unrecoverable diminishment and death in a way no one else has dared. No sentimentality, no upbeat insistence, just the truth. Those who enjoyed Didion in her prime, and in theirs, will find that this book speaks to them with stunning honesty.

5 people found this helpful

wonderful tribute of a mother's love of her child

having lost an only child I identified with Joan looking back over the memories - looking for a clue or sign to help understand the lost of a child along with some regrets & things you might have done differently. The book is a tribute to a mother's love for her child.

5 people found this helpful

Read it in a day I liked it so much.

What made the experience of listening to Blue Nights the most enjoyable?

I loved the writing and the tale.

What did you like best about this story?

I believed it.

Which character – as performed by Kimberly Farr – was your favorite?

The mother.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The relationship between the mother and her daughter was painful and powerful all at the same time.

Any additional comments?

If you like Joan Didian, you'll like this book.

3 people found this helpful

Haunting

Only those people that have experienced the death of their child can truly understand the pain that Joan Didion tried to express in this story.

2 people found this helpful

very worthwile

Would you listen to Blue Nights again? Why?

Yes, because it is poetic and well read.

What other book might you compare Blue Nights to and why?

The Year of Magical Thinking. Both are beautifully written and convey a sense of honesty and bravery.

Have you listened to any of Kimberly Farr’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

A book about grief, love, adoption and getting older.

2 people found this helpful

Thought-provoking, chilling & endearing

What did you love best about Blue Nights?

Joan Didion ~ again!

Who was your favorite character and why?

Joan Didion represented to me ~ in only ways that she can articulate ~ what it means to be a mother and what it means to be in the 'third chapter' of life. Her insights about the incidents and passages in life that we think are important as they are happening, in contrast to what, upon reflection and after the fact, are actually important, are exquisite.

What about Kimberly Farr’s performance did you like?

I thought it was outstanding. At times I forgot that I was not listening to Joan Didion's voice.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The entire story is moving, but the ending touched me to the bone.

Any additional comments?

I recommend this book whether on audio or in print.

5 people found this helpful

Twilights turn Long and Blue

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and rolling the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue."
-- Joan Didion, Blue Nights

It has been a decade since Joan Didion's daughter Quintana died. Joan Didion was 75 when she wrote this book. She wrote her first grief memoir The Year of Magical Thinking after her husband died in 2003. It dealt with her husband's death and her daughter's hospitalization (Quintana would later die in 2005 from pancreatitis. So, within about a year-and-a-half Didion would lose her husband and her daughter. Two deaths. Two books. The first primarily focuses on her husband's sudden death and her daughter's illness. The second focuses on her daughter and her own frailty.

Didion summarizes what she is after with this book in chapter 9:

"When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them...

The ways in which our investments in each other remain to freighted ever to see the other clear.
The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or illness or even aging of the other."

She then clarifies that what this novel became, however, was more "the refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death."

This novel is better when she is using her knife to cut to the core of this failure, this fear, this inability to see people when they are here. This novel is genius when she is piercing the center of grief and exploring how grief is often the realization that memories often provide evidence to how unawake we were to the people we loved when it mattered, when they lived. How the fear of death also contains the seeds of knowledge. We begin to understand that those cherished memories of loved ones gone, will die with us. That with our own deaths those memories die forever. They vanish into the night. Our loved ones die twice.

This novel is weak, however, because at times it seems like a prose sorting of old memories. Like going through a loved ones box of sundries and remembering the whens, the whys, the hows. It is a bit scattered and while still good, it was just not great. It is also weak in her repetitions. I get what she was doing. The repetition of certain memories and phrases were like a mantra, a prayer, a devotion. It felt a little like Gertrude Stein, but lacked Stein's beauty or Didion's power. One of my least favorite of Didion's nonfiction.

14 people found this helpful