William Henderson: Dividing loss from not-loss

I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking six years ago. Three sittings, if I remember correctly. Didion’s honesty – brutal – blew me away. I hadn’t read Didion before, which I corrected immediately. I loved the prose, and I re-read several paragraphs, just to hear the cadence. I recommended the book to several people. And I hoped to one day meet her.

But I didn’t understand how long loss can lost, and how writing about loss can be more painful than the loss itself, until last year.

I’ve already been a fast reader. Two or three books a week, even after my son was born. Do I remember every word from every book? No. But I can tell you if I’ve read something and if I liked it. Last year, as I was dealing with the aftermath of loss that, while not as brutal as Didion’s but brutal nonetheless, I stopped reading. I’d try and I couldn’t get past a few pages. I’d get tired. I’d go to sleep. And we’re talking books I’d long anticipated. The couldn’t – and still can’t – finish the books I had been reading at the time. Sometimes I think books are sponges and soak up loss and pain. I inhale books and I remember where I was and what I was doing when I first read that book.

I couldn’t read books, and I couldn’t concentrate on much else, and I wondered why I couldn’t read books, and why I couldn’t concentrate on much else, and then I was moving into a new apartment, and I was unpacking my 124 boxes of books – true story; I have 12 six-shelf bookshelves in my living room, double filled – and I came across The Year of Magical Thinking and I thought I’d like to re-read this book, and I re-read the book and this time, I recognized loss because I had lost and I recognized how vulnerable she is by writing so honestly about loss and I wrote down several of her sentences because I didn’t want to forget these sentences.

When I heard that she was coming out with a sequel of sorts – Blue Nights – I couldn’t wait to return to Didion’s world. I read Blue Nights in one sitting. Three hours. Start to finish. I’ll re-read it in a few weeks, probably when other reviews are released, and definitely before an event she will be at in New York in November (when I finally will get the chance to hear her read).

Is Blue Nights as brutal as The Year of Magical Thinking? No. Could anything be as brutal as The Year of Magical Thinking? No.

Blue Nights fills in some gaps and continues the story of how Didion grappled with the loss of her husband and daughter. Blue Nights is the story of Didion’s daughter – Quintana Roo. Didion covers Roo’s adoption and childhood and adulthood and marriage and illness and subsequent death. Didion doesn’t linger over some of the more intimate details of Roo’s life – diagnoses of manic depression and, ultimately, borderline personality disorder – but what Didion captures (I’d like to say beautifully but beautifully may not be the right word) – what Didion captures is the way a life unfolds with no plan and with no map and how easily this life can be lost.

Loss. Again, and always, loss.

Blue Nights, writes Didion, refers to the period of time between summer and autumn when “twilights turn long and blue.” Blue Nights refers to a period of change. Blue Nights refers to “illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness.”

This dying of the brightness continues to haunt me. I’ve experienced these blue nights, not the way Didion has, or, I’ve never noticed this period of time when the world seems blue – but I’ve experienced nights when my world seemed blue, and I had no choice but to write about how blue my world seemed and the divide these blue nights made – between summer and autumn, life and not-life, then and now.

I craved books about loss last fall, if only to see how other people survived. I’ve always turned to books to figure out things. Deciphering the way I felt was no different. The Year of Magical Thinking was the first of several books I read and re-read last autumn, and while I was unable to finish some (Fury, by Koren Zalickas and The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham), I was able, slowly, to finish others.

I’ve reading again, the way I used to. Voraciously. I may not be reading two or three books a week now, but the number of my children has doubled, so I suppose finishing one book a week is acceptable.

Blue Nights is surely not the last we’ve heard from Didion. I’d love to see her return to fiction, if only to see how her losses color fictional worlds. But until then, I’ll revisit Blue Nights, and probably The Year of Magical Thinking, and I will think these books old friends, with smells that remind me of loss and not-loss and how surviving sometimes is one day at a time, in moments of twilight, blue, dividing now from then.