At Vanity Fair, author Christopher Hitchens wrote about Joan Didion‘s upcoming memoir, Blue Nights. The book deals with the kind of grief that no one wants to endure.
A follow-up to her 2005 bestseller The Year of Magical Thinking (which explores the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne), Blue Nights shares the heartbreaking story of losing her daughter.
Here is an excerpt from the book: “This was never supposed to happen to her, I remember thinking – outraged, as if she and I had been promised a special exemption- in the third of those intensive care units. By the time she reached the fourth, I was no longer invoking this special exemption. When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.”Here is more from Christopher Hitchens‘ piece in Vanity Fair: “In the course of setting it down, she came to realize that she could no longer compose in the old style: the one that she had ‘supposed to be like writing music.’ And what kind of music could this have been, except the Blues? But blue is more than the shade of a symphony. It is where the ‘bolt’ comes from, as Didion mordantly notes. It can register the transit of an entire evening, from the first, faint translucent gloaming to the near-inky cerulean black.”