User:RoseHarris2020/Blue Nights

=Background= On New Year's weekend of 1966, Joan's friend Diana Lynn brought up the conversation of adoption. Joan and John were struggling to have a child of their own, and Diana gave them the name of the doctor who had delivered her own adopted children. It was in the early hours of March 3, 1966 that Joan and John received a call from that same doctor stating that he had just delivered a baby girl and needed to know whether or not they wanted her. An hour later Joan and John stood outside the nursery with no question, this baby was going to be theirs. During her early years, Quintana struggled with the knowledge of her adoption. Quintana could be heard questioning what would have happened should John not have picked up the phone on March 3, 1966 or if there had been an accident on the freeway on their way to pick her up.

Quintana was diagnosed during her early years with a multitude of 'diagnosis' for her anxiety and depression, which were all guesses at the time. It was not until her adult life, that a doctor diagnosed her with 'borderline personality disorder'. The symptoms of such a diagnosis were apparent in Quintana's character. Joan had witnessed theses affects "I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair." With all the confusion surrounding her mental state, Quintana would spend her early adult life self medicating with alcohol. It would be this addiction that would lead her to meet her bartender husband, Gerald Brian Michael. On July 26 2010, Quintana married Gerry in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue.

On December 24, 2003 Quintana was admitted to the emergency room with flu like symptoms. Her illness, which had seemed routine would soon become life threatening. To the surprise of everyone, it was Joan's husband John who died of a heart attack on December 30, 2003. The funeral would have to wait until Quintana was strong enough to attend. Afterwards, Quintana had planned a trip to Los Angeles whereupon she fell and hit her head exiting the airport. Two years of recovery would not suffice, her injury coupled with her multiple illness would lead to her death on August 26, 2005.

The memoir Blue Nights deals, not with Quintana's illnesses or her death, but rather with Joan's mourning process. The memoir covers the timeline of Quintana's life via Joan's understanding of it. Joan, in the novel, struggles to come to terms with her mothering of Quintana. Joan questions whether she lived up to the title of mother, and whether Quintana would agree.

Reception
Following the release of this memoir in 2011, many critics agreed that Joan's style had become more reflective. In a New York Times review, by John Banville, it is stated that Joan's style changed after the memoir that focused on the death of her husband, A Year of Magical Thinking. Banville states that Joan, having not been able to find an outlet for her grief following the unexpected death of her husband, began to write The Year of Magical Thinking as her way of mourning her late husband John. With Quintana's death, Joan takes much longer to compile her thoughts in a way that she wants them represented. After writing the initial drafts, Joan rewrites in order to make that turn from cold journalistic reporting to more emotional reflection. Joan's struggle to express her grief is explicated by critic Rachel Cusk, from the Guardian. Cusk states "Blue Nights is in a sense the manifestation of this frailty, the dwindling and fading of the artist's ability to create order out of randomness and chaos of experience". Other critics such as Hellar McAlpin, from the Washington Post, focus more on the impact of the stylistic choices made by Didion, "a beautiful condolence note to humanity about some of the painful realities of the human condition that deserves to be painted on traditional black-boarded mourning stationary".