Book #34: Blue Nights by Joan Didion

I have a soft spot in my heart for Joan Didion. I wrote the best paper of my undergraduate career on her book Democracy, a paper that I poured hundreds of hours and all of my effort into and that I used for my grad school applications. I think all of the ambition and effort that I had for school was used up on that one paper--but man, it was a really good essay.

Democracy was fiction, but I really love her non-fiction as well. I asked for her A Year of Magical Thinking a few years ago for Christmas, and Blue Nights is something of a companion book to that first one. AYMT is about the death of her husband and the year that she had after that horrible experience, and Blue Nights is about the subsequent sudden death of her daughter and their relationship and her feelings of being bereft with the loss of these two people. Didion communicates her feelings and fears and sadness very well, and really gives a good idea of what going through a period of bereavement is like. I can't help but feel so sorry for her, though. She seems so very alone in the world now, with her husband and her one child dead before her. This was kind of a depressing book to read while pregnant (about her child dying), too. I started and finished it in one day, though, so it didn't take very long. It made me remember about my continual goals to read everything she's written.