“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.”
Blue Nights begins with Joan Didion’s meditation on the mercurial highs and midpoints of the April-through-June season. A time soaked in intangible, perhaps spiritual, restlessness that forewarns the impermanence of the approaching summer period.
The blue nights in Didion’s vision are a premonition of mourning—warning the end to come, like fore-memories (if you can call them that) of grief.
These long blue twilights are a metaphor for the premature tragedy affecting Didion’s narration. An unspoken yet precedented grief of loss still and yet to come.
Didion’s memoir is permeated by the shapelessness of these sensations. Carrying in its consonants the uncertainty of time and the inevitability of decay in light of her daughter, Quintana’s passing.
Blue Nights, as Didion’s fourth and final memoir, is a quiet, less forgiving homage to grief than, let’s say, the more composed The Year of Magical Thinking, which secured Didion much of her celebrations.
But it is all the more unsparing as a tribute to Quintana Roo, her right hand and joy. It’s also the most stylistically assertive work in Didion’s oeuvre, featuring the purest and most sensitive expression of her signature diaristic mode.
Now, over a decade since its publication and four years after Didion’s passing, a final piece of her inner world is set to be revealed. Notes to John is a personal journal discovered in a filing cabinet next to her desk.
It will be published in April, offering the world one last chance to hear from the great diarist and to unpick Didion herself.
Notes To John
Written before Blue Nights, the journal records Didion’s sessions with a psychiatrist, covering her struggles with depression, alcoholism, and, most significantly, her relationship with Quintana.
According to its publisher, these conversations were central to the themes Didion would later explore in her late works, including Blue Nights.
The upcoming, controversial publication of Notes to John will widen Didion’s cultural and literary legacy, providing an intimate extension of her lifelong commitment to self-examination.
This posthumous release has been condemned by critics as an invasion of privacy. Yet, it further highlights Didion’s image as a personal writer drawn to raw, unguarded experience and existential observation.
Didion’s writing disregarded the boundaries between experience, reportage, and critique, from her early years as a “New” Journalist in the ’50s to the twilight years of nonfiction writing that would ultimately define her legacy.
The diaristic tone made her a notable addition among literary contemporaries such as Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe. It secured her popularity in the postmodern age, where she resonated with an audience that prized the hyper-critical, hyper-observational, and self-referential.
Blue Nights stands as the most crucial example of her uninhibited, diaristic literary tendencies and the culmination of Didion’s lifelong commitment to a conscious voice.
Though overshadowed by famous predecessors like The Year of Magical Thinking and Play It As It Lays, it holds the remarkable secrets of the language, rhythm, and prose that made Didion unparalleled in American letters.
Into The Blue
Written in fragmented and looping recollections, the unique language of Blue Nights is an attempt to account for the way tragedy unsettles time. Memories surfacing and receding unpredictably, meaning simultaneously crystallizing and dissolving.
Blue Nights’s reality is steeped in duality—beauty and warning, memory and premonition. Impermanence becomes the book’s ruling metaphor, pushing the fleeting nature of certainty, the illusion of endlessness, and the continuous tension between duration and loss.
Didion employs her diaristic narration not to hold grief at bay but to find an unsettling musicality. A linguistic rhythm that lingers and reverberates, allowing these experiences to bleed naturally into the physicality of her prose.
Its voice holds both sensory and intellectual sensation. Didion’s blue is not merely a color but a physical and emotional experience. A saturation that one swims in and an atmospheric presence that seems, for a moment, to suspend time.
In the opening sentences, she tells us, “the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone,” and we are lost in awareness of life’s vanishing edges, resting in the promise of moments that seem to suspend time while, in reality, serving as harbingers of its passing.
Didion’s language oscillates between the natural and the artificial. The blue of twilight deepens like the stained glass at Chartres, an image of the divine and the eternal.
Yet it is also likened to the Cerenkov radiation from nuclear reactors, an eerie, man-made glow that speaks to decay and destruction. She continues to tick off specific observations over the rest of the pages, stressing the story’s domestic but universal concerns.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
With the upcoming publication of Notes to John, we witness the final and symbolic act of Didion’s legacy: the turning of the personal into the universal.
With the release of the journals, the boundaries between Didion’s consciousness and her audience will blur beyond propriety, encouraging an intimacy that Didion toyed with but never permitted in her lifetime.
Today, the art of the personal, reflective style so deeply intertwined with Didion’s voice is suggestive of an era that, in the wake of her passing, can never be recalled. Notes to John will be the final glimpse into the mind of a writer who defined the domestic American voice. A closing survey of a fading tradition and attempt to delay time, even as it continues to slip away.
As Didion in her most quintessential form, Blue Nights speaks to the fragile nature of legacies, both personal and cultural. It’s reflections on memory, decay, and the fading of tradition mirrors the decline of the very literary movement Didion represented.
Just as Quintana’s passing symbolized a broader, unmanageable shift, Didion’s passing is symbolic of the loss of a literary era.
In her final memoir, Didion encodes the inevitability of this change, warning that some losses are irreconcilable, grief is an undoing, memory both sanctuary and disfiguration, and of the unfaithfulness of time’s vanishing act.
She writes to us in the last autobiographical narrative, as she would in, say, a journal, to explain that the present is safely lost before it appears. The light is always going and nothing gold can stay.
Blue Nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but according to Didion, they are also its warning.
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