Quintana's story

Meghan O'Rourke reviews Joan Didion's Blue Nights:

Much of the book is about Quintana, who died at age 39, after a host of health problems following a bout with pneumonia, and after years of struggling with alcohol abuse and mood disorders. But it is not a simple elegy for a lost daughter. It is, rather, an account of Didion’s circling questions about her own accountability for Quintana’s struggles and her sense of ultimate mortality—which is as much a subject of the book as Quintana is. There is nothing for the author to recover here. The book instead bears harsh witness to the realization that the past can never be fixed (a realization many parents must at some point confront).

Hasan Altaf, in a more critical piece on Didion's work, takes issue with the obvious similarities between characters in each book:

I still feel that the characters in Didion's novels are almost interchangeable (Treat Morrison can stand in for Jack Lovett, Inez Victor and Charlotte Douglas have much in common) but as a writer I don't think she is particularly interested in her characters. The real subject of her novels seems to me to be systems, structures, societies. Each of the novels is set in a different world - Sacramento agricultural society, Hollywood, "the three or four solvent families in Boca Grande" - and these worlds all have their own rules for their own games. The protagonists of the novels are slightly out of sync with their societies; they do not or cannot play the game they are expected to. Maria Wyeth again: "I mean, maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?"

(Video: In this short film excerpt, directed by Griffin Dunne, Joan Didion reads a selection from the first chapter of her memoir, Blue Nights.)