Calamity heaped upon calamity

MEMOIR: MARY MORRISSYreviews Blue NightsBy Joan Didion Fourth Estate, 188pp. £14.99

'WE LIVE ENTIRELY, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images," Joan Didion once claimed. But if her memoir Blue Nightsis about anything, it's about the failure of narrative in the face of catastrophic loss. Not that that's surprising. In the mid 2000s Didion endured a series of anni horribili. Her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack in December 2003; at the same time, her daughter, Quintana, fell seriously ill. (She was in an intensive-care unit with septic shock when told of her father's death.)

Didion wrote her Pulitzer-winning grief memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, in a white heat in just three months in the year after Dunne's death. By the time that forensic excavation of mourning for her dead husband was published, in October 2005, Quintana, aged 39, was also dead. (Didion opted not to change the text to reflect this new cruel truth, so Quintana's unmentioned death gave The Year of Magical Thinkingan added charge, the reader being privy to information the author didn't have while writing the book.)

In Blue NightsDidion returns to the subject of grief. But, unlike its predecessor, this is a book less about letting go than about holding on. In it, Didion attempts to raise her daughter from the dead. Does she succeed? Well, no. Six years have intervened since Quintana's death. Where The Year of Magical Thinkinghad the immediacy of contemporaneous experience, Blue Nightstakes a longer, cooler view, and what emerges is a more willed, elliptical narrative and a broken voice.

Quintana’s defining characteristic was that she was adopted. As Didion tells it, the decision to adopt seems almost casual. At a New Year’s party in 1966, on a boat moored near Catalina Island, off the coast of southern California, she mentions to a well-connected friend that she is trying for a baby. (Didion is a ferocious name-dropper: Herman Mankiewizc, Natasha Richardson, Paul Newman and Kenneth Tynan, among others, are mentioned; film premieres, red-carpet events and blue-chip hotels are constantly flagged.) The friend recommends an obstetrician who “arranges” adoptions. Three months later the doctor calls. “ ‘I have a beautiful baby girl at St John’s’ is what he had said. ‘I need to know if you want her.’ ” For the reader, there’s the queasy sensation of shopping for a baby.

Despite her privileged upbringing, Quintana grew up troubled by uncertainty about her origins: “What if you hadn’t answered the phone when Dr Watson called, what if you hadn’t been home, what if you couldn’t meet him at the hospital, what if there’d been an accident on the freeway, what would happen to me then?” she would constantly ask her mother. These insecurities seem to have grown into something more pathological. She was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, manic depression and borderline personality disorder. Despite all these details, though, Quintana remains infuriatingly fugitive, more medical case history than living, breathing human.

Didion dwells on fragmentary memories of her daughter that form some private mythology: Quintana’s recurring childhood nightmares of a personal bogeyman she named the Broken Man, fragments of a novel she wrote at the age of 13 in which she killed herself off, the Christian Louboutin heels she wore on her wedding day. (Didion likes to mention brand names, too.) These mental mementos are revisited time and again, but to little cumulative effect. The other narrative tic Didion employs is a mantra of rhetorical questions. The book is peppered with them. “When we talk about our children what are we saying? Are we saying what it meant to us to have them? What it meant to us not to have them? What it meant to let them go? Are we talking about the enigma of pledging ourselves to protect the unprotectable? About the whole puzzle of being a parent?”

The Joan Didion of old (even the Joan Didion of The Year of Magical Thinking) would at some stage hazard answers to these questions in her trademark cool, dry prose. But there are no answers here, only further self-lacerating questions, pages of them: "Was I the problem? Was I always the problem?" In the past, she admits, her writing, as a journalist, novelist and celebrated essayist, came easily to her. "In fact, in any real sense, what I was doing then was never writing at all: I was sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell me what it was I was saying." In Blue Nightsthat facility deserts her.

Only towards the end of the memoir, when Didion turns the narrative attention away from resurrecting her daughter and concentrates on herself, does any real engagement occur. At last we feel the unflinching gaze that Didion employed in The Year of Magical Thinking, as her own health problems take centre stage. She is diagnosed with a brain aneurysm and suffers paralysing panic attacks and shingles, all of which emphasises the fastness of her solitude. The most poignant moment comes when she is asked during one of her numerous hospital visits to name a next of kin who can be contacted in case of emergency and Didion realises that no one close enough is left to call. She is 75, alone and frighteningly frail.

Whereas The Year of Magical Thinkingwas vital to getting through her bereavement, Blue Nightsseems to hold up its hands in despair. But for a writer dedicated to imposing narrative order to acknowledge, even unconsciously, that words have failed her paradoxically makes Blue Nightsa courageous, subversive work.

Mary Morrissy is novelist, short-story writer and critic. She is writer in residence at University College Dublin