‘Magical Thinking’ author Didion examines daughter’s death in raw ‘Blue Nights’

TORONTO – Joan Didion says her award-winning 2005 memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which examined the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, “literally wrote itself.”

By contrast, she struggled mightily with the recently published “Blue Nights,” about her adopted daughter and only child Quintana Roo, who passed away at age 39 just 20 months after Dunne.

It was a book Didion simply did not want to write.

“I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I finally finished,” the 76-year-old author said in a recent interview.

Quintana died of acute pancreatitis shortly before “Magical Thinking” was published. Touring for that book, Didion found herself not mentioning her daughter. She ultimately decided to work out her feelings on paper.

“I realized that, essentially, it was the one thing on my mind and I hadn’t dealt with it so I thought I’d better deal with it and then see what came of that.”

It didn’t come easy.

Didion initially thought she’d write a book about parenting, examining how times have changed since she and Dunne brought Quintana home from a Santa Monica hospital in 1966. But her plan soon changed.

“I found myself writing a different kind of book,” explained the acclaimed journalist, author and screenwriter, who is originally from California but is now based in New York.

“Always it was in the cards that it would turn out to be personal, because that was what was on my mind, but I didn’t realize how personal.”

Filled with intimate memories of Quintana’s childhood in sun-bathed Malibu, “Blue Nights” is also a blunt rumination on aging, as well as a forum for the author to agonize over her perceived parental shortcomings.

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Again and again, Didion found herself confronting topics she didn’t want to write about, such as Quintana’s reunion with her biological family.

“I had always thought of her adoption as … her story to tell it if she wanted to tell it, but in fact she couldn’t tell it,” said the author.

“I really resisted this book and I was always hitting places that I thought I couldn’t write about and I would talk to a friend who had lived through it with me and he kept saying: ‘But you can’t tell this story and not do such-and-such.'”

The title provides an exquisite metaphor for the ideas explored within the book.

“Blue Nights,” Didion explains in her opening chapter, refer to a period in certain latitudes between spring and summer when the twilight is extended. The English, she notes, call it “the gloaming.”

“During the blue nights you think the end of the day will never come,” she writes. That notion becomes a springboard for the author to explore her feelings on mortality and motherhood – and her unshakable sense that she has not been sufficiently grateful for events in her life.

Didion writes that “warnings” and “notices of darkness” came in spring 2009 when she received a call informing her that family friend Natasha Richardson was dying of a traumatic brain injury after falling on a bunny slope at a Quebec ski resort.

Other portents came as Didion found herself grappling with health issues and the vagaries of old age: “Time passes,” she writes in the book. “Could it be that I never believed it? Did I believe the blue nights could last forever?”

While the author once diligently saved Quintana’s book reports, gym shorts and baby teeth, she now eschews such mementoes because they remind her of moments she “inadequately appreciated.”

“I want actually to clean out my house of all that stuff … part of wanting to do that is that it reminds me of certain failure in my own ability to appreciate them when it was happening,” Didion said during this week’s interview.

“But there’s another reason, you want to get rid of all that stuff because suddenly you’re surrounded by it, suddenly you can’t open a drawer without finding some memento, which is not actually how I want to live the rest of my life.”

Not surprisingly, “Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights” have provided solace for many readers who want to share their stories of grief with Didion. It means something to the author that her work is able to help others.

“I had not expected that to matter but it does for both books. I had noticed when ‘Magical Thinking’ was published that it did seem to touch an emotional place in some readers and I was surprised to notice how gratifying that was to me,” she said.

Didion seems to be finished examining her grief for now. She says she’d like her next project to be “entirely different,” although she’s not sure what form it will take.

While she wouldn’t describe writing “Blue Nights” as therapeutic (“there is no therapy for this, for losing a child,” notes the writer), it did help her process the experience.

An unexamined fact is like a rattlesnake, Didion has said. That conviction, always on the author’s mind because of her California upbringing, was part of what propelled her to finish a book she never wanted to write.

“The idea was if you kept (rattlesnakes) at your sightlines they couldn’t hurt you,” she said.

“If you don’t see that (a rattlesnake) is there it will spring at you … but if you know it’s there you will tend to move back and you won’t let it spring at you.”