Joan Didion on Loss

I have written about Joan Didion, whose work I have been reading for decades, and whom I twice heard speak, on this blog (3/23/11). Her most painful book to date, and her most successful, was "The Year of Magical Thinking," a searingly sad memoir about her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, his sudden death, and Didion's struggle to come to terms with his death. Now she has written a new and equally sad book, "Blue Nights," about her daughter, Quintana Roo, her troubled life, and her far too early death at age 39, only a few months after her father died. The current (10/24/11) issue of New York Magazine has a fascinating but very painful article about Didion, her new book, and her daughter's life and death. Quintana Roo suffered from depression and alcohol abuse, and although she had started a career in photography and photo editing, she was fragile and vulnerable. Didion worried about her, of course, and also worried that she, Didion, had not been a good enough mother to her daughter. Didion says in an interview for the magazine that as much as she loved her daughter, she didn't truly know or understand her. So "Blue Nights" is as much about Didion herself as it is about her daughter. Quintana Roo remains an enigma. Didion is clearly ambivalent about her reason for writing the book; she states in the New York interview that she wanted to get her preoccupation with understanding her daughter "off her mind," but then contradicts herself and says she wrote the book to "bring [her] back." The New York photos of the aging, fragile looking Didion show a person who has suffered greatly, who is overwhelmed with loss, yet still able to use her gift of writing in order to try to understand these two terrible blows, these shocking deaths, she has endured.