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SUSAN STRAIGHT

on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.

Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and Quintana Roo Dunne
Central Park, New York, 1970 © Dominick Dunne

The Los Angeles Review of Books  gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of the publication of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” That attention to style, structure, perspective, and meaning animates these essays by Matthew Specktor, Amy Wilentz, Amy Ephron, Meghan Daum, Richard Rayner, and today Susan Straight, who at 17 resented the way her Inland Empire friends and neighbors were portrayed in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” but wanted to write like Didion anyway.

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Joan Didion
Blue Nights
Alfred A. Knopf, November 2011. 208 pp.

“She was born in the first hour of the third day of March, 1966, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica,” Joan Didion writes in Blue Nights.

We were told that we could adopt her late the afternoon of the same day … One of the nurses had tied a pink ribbon in the fierce dark hair. “Not that baby,” John would repeat to her again and again in the years that followed, reenacting the nursery scene, the recommended “choice” narrative, the moment when, of all the babies in the nursery, we picked her. “Not that baby… that baby. The baby with the ribbon.”

“Do that baby,” she would repeat in return …

A reader of Blue Nights might not realize that the most dedicated of Didion devotees, such as I am, have been hearing about “the baby” for all these many years. Now she is gone, and Didion is bereft, as any mother would be. But this mother is one of America’s most famous chroniclers of bereftness and alienation and the landscape of despair, and in Blue Nights Didion circles the images of her past like a wary woman who has found a basket lodged in the reeds that contains a sleeping infant.

And, as it happens, on the night of finding the baby in 1966, Didion realizes that she is not ready. That night, Didion’s sister-in-law informs her that they must go to Saks in the morning to buy a layette. Didion is appalled that she hadn’t even thought of a layette, or a bassinet, and she dreams that very same night that she’s left the baby asleep in a drawer and forgotten her. “Dreaming in other words that I had failed,” she writes. “Been given a baby and failed to keep her safe.”

The baby, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, died at age 39. Blue Nights opens with what would have been Quintana’s seventh wedding anniversary.

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(Source: lareviewofbooks)