Joan Didion: Blue Nights

I oppfølgeren, hvis jeg nå kan tillate meg et så skjødesløst begrep, på The Year of Magical Thinking, gransker Joan Didion sitt eget liv slik hun lever det som gammel kvinne, med døden foran seg, med minnene av de døde rundt seg. I lys av datterens død ser hun tilbake på hva slags liv hun ga henne.

Hun viser oss frykten hun har for at hun ikke kan finne de riktige ordene, at hun ikke kan snakke og skrive rett ut. Særlig om Quintana har hun problemer med å være direkte, skriver hun. Men hun er direkte nok, vi skjønner henne utmerket.

“My intention had been to make Magical Thinking less polished, and I thought I had done that until I finished it,” Didion says. “And then I realized that it was exactly as polished as everything I wrote had always been.”

She set out to try something rougher—though not quite as rough, she says, as the book she ultimately published. “I was going to make it more theoretical than it turned out to be, less specifically about Quintana,” she says. “It was going to be much less personal.” Instead, she wrote the most personal, wrenching book of her life. Magical Thinking, not exactly a breezy piece of work, “simply wrote itself,” she says. “This did not write itself.”


Da Blue Nights kom ut leste jeg endel omtaler, flere lettvint kritiske som denne i Cleveland:Here is what else Didion mentions: that Quintana wore Christian Louboutins at her wedding. That the cake was from Payard. That in the 1960s Didion favored Donald Brooks shifts and a Porthault parasol for Quintana. That when Didion is told to eat ice cream to gain weight, she orders it from Maison du Chocolat (Haagen-Dazs is for the masses).

Ah, you might say, these are highly specific details that tell of a place and era.

No. They seem calculated to convey Didion's exquisite taste. The label-mongering reads like a more snobbish version of "Sex and the City."

In "Blue Nights," the writer bristles at the word "privileged" being used to describe her family. But among all her status bread crumbs, it is difficult to find Didion, and worse, difficult to care.

Jeg er som du skjønner uenig

Hun skjuler ikke problemene, hun nevner dem, Quintanas depresjoner og alkoholkonsum, sine egne fornektelser. Men hun henger ved detaljene, det overfladiske er ikke bare overflate, det er de konkrete tingene i livet som man ofte husker det ved.

Alle disse konkrete og repeterende nevnelsene står i avsnitt mellom hendelser og ting Quintana har sagt tiår tilbake som hun kommer på igjen og som hun re-tolker. Nevnelsene er også en form, som viser spennet mellom tingene som omgir oss og hva slags betydning eller ikke-betyding vi gir dem.

Dessuten, snerrer Didion: Priviligert er noe annet, en mening, a judgement, an accusation.

Sant nok

Selv om, jeg vil selv nevne at når hun våkner med vondt i øret og et rødflammet område i ansiktet, I would need that morning to see an otolaryngologist og I would need that morning to see a dermatologist. Det er priviligert, det er noe som faktisk er priviligert.


Joan Didion skriver at hun ikke vil ha tingene lenger, in fact I no longer value this kind of memento. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

...a period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their "things", their totems.

Men hun kvitter seg jo ikke med tingene, hvem kan jeg kan ikke, og like etter beskriver hun hvordan hun ikke får plass til sine egne klær fordi skapene er fulle av døde folks klær og hundre sider senere skriver hun I can now afford to think about her. I no longer cry when I hear her name.


A framed copy of “The World,” a poem Quintana wrote when she was seven, hangs in Didion’s kitchen, printed carefully on construction paper:

The world/Has nothing/But morning/And Night/ It has no/Day or lunch/So this world/Is poor and desertid.

Quintana, Didion says, was preoccupied with dying, but she adds, “We lived always in sunny places.... it was hard to see the dark. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t see any reason to see it.”

Didion was able to ignore other things as well. She says she wasn’t aware of getting old “until John [Dunne] died.” She refused to acknowledge her mother’s decline. She only wanted to see the lightness in her child, the beautiful baby, the young girl in her school uniform, the bride with flowers in her hair.

Når hun dissekerer seg finner hun at hun holder den voksne Quintana fast i barnet, mens hun presser barne-Quintana inn i voksenverden. Jeg syns hun er streng med seg, det gjør ikke noe om barn lærer seg praktiskheter ved foreldrenes arbeide, litt anderledes enn Keith Richards som lot den lille sønnen ta den voksnes ansvar.

Jeg skrev om The Year of Magical Thinking i 2006



Just let me be in the ground
Just let me be in the ground and go to sleep

Joan Didion kommer stadig tilbake til de ordene datteren sa en gang og hun knytter dem sammen med The Diving Bell and the Butterfly en bok av Jean-Dominique Bauby som beskriver hvordan han ble ute av stand til å kommunisere med andre etter et slag, it was extremely meaningful to Quintana, so markedly so that I never told her that I did not much like it, or for that matter even entirely believe it.

Only later, when she was for most purposes locked into her own condition, confined to a wheelchair and afflicted by the detritus of a bleedinto her brainand the subsequent neurosurgery, did I begin to seeits point.

Just let me be in the ground
Just let me be in the ground and go to sleep

Boka ble en film mange av oss husker, etter at Quintana døde.