Much has already been said about Joan Didion’s memoir, Blue Nights. Equally, much has been said about grief, ageing, parenting and health – by Didion and hundreds of other authors. For that reason I won’t dwell on every element of this book. However, one part stood out – ‘the chosen child’ narrative.

To provide context, Blue Nights examines the period after the sudden death of Didion’s husband, playwright John Gregory Dunne, AND separately, the slow death of their daughter, Quintana. It’s not about the raw and immediate grief, but rather the fragments – the bits we’re left with after everyone else is ‘getting on with life’. And it is these bits, scattered memories, that Didion interrogates in Blue Nights, looking for clues as to whether she was a ‘good’ mother and wife.

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Didion reflects on how Quintana was adopted; how that was discussed as she was growing up (enter the ‘choice’ narrative); and the impact of Quintana’s brief relationship with her biological family when she was an adult.

All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to have been abandoned by their natural. They are programmed, by the unique circumstances of their introduction into the family structure, to see abandonment as their role, their fate, the destiny that will overtake them unless they outrun it. Quintana.
All adoptive parents, I do not need to be told, fear that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them. Quintana.

And then, Quintana – who was ‘chosen’ by Joan and John – dies, and the reader is left with the obvious – that no parent would choose this – that a parent would give their own life to avoid the suffering of their child. And there’s the notion of whether the tragedy might have been averted if choices had been different, and the big one – if Joan had known the immense despair and heartbreak that lay ahead, would she have ‘chosen’ to become a parent?

This was never supposed to happen to her, I remember thinking – outraged, as if she and I had been promised a special exemption…

In parallel to the story of the adoption, runs the story of Quintana’s diagnosis with Borderline Personality Disorder, a feature of which includes ‘frantic efforts to avoid abandonment’. Again, the reader joins the dots between the sense of being ‘abandoned’ and then ‘chosen’. Didion wonders, ‘How could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her? Had she no idea how much we needed her?’

The meditative quality of this book, and the rhythm of Didion’s repeated phrases, oddly served to dull some of the pain she is expressing. A strange writerly trick, to slowly reveal her vulnerabilities but also find a way to soothe the reader. And yet, there were also parts that brought me to an abrupt stop. For example –

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

and

“You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone…. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

I’ll return to parts of this memoir again. It offered some new perspectives on grief, both in relation to bereavement and to the ambiguous grief associated with adoptive and biological families.

4/5 Superb.

When she said she wanted cucumber and watercress sandwiches at her wedding I remembered her laying out plates of cucumber and watercress sandwiches on the table we had set up around her pool for her sixteenth-birthday lunch.