“’Like when someone dies, you don’t dwell on it,’” Joan Didion recalls her daughter telling her. But while this is one of the recurrent mantras of Blue Nights (Knopf, $25), Didion’s companion volume to The Year of Magical Thinking, she finds that whatever she thinks about—writing, films, friends, travels—she is indeed dwelling on the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo. What does it mean for a parent to suffer such a tragedy? Didion poses the question in myriad ways and is repeatedly stunned by the answers. Some take her back to Quintana’s childhood, and Didion probes the past for clues to later events. Others force her to face a future—rapidly becoming the present—in which there’s no one to summon “in case of emergency.” Turning 75 as she writes, Didion examines the nearly complete sweep of her life, and brings this poignant, powerful essay full circle as she realizes the truth of another of the book’s refrains, which is that “when we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”
