Joan Didion: The Absolute Emotional Risk that is Motherhood

“I know what it is I am now experiencing.
I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
You may see nothing still to be lost,
Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her”(BN 187).

This is how Joan Didion ends her book Blue Nights. The book about parenting, the death of her daughter, the book about mothering, the book about aging.

What does she mean? I asked myself when I read these last lines. Does she mean she is afraid to lose the memory of her daughter Quintana? Then she would lose her connection to her? The wall and the locked door refer to the place where she interred her ashes, next to her husband’s, just short of two years after his death.

When I read Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, the book detailing the first year after the unexpected death of her husband, John Dunne, I saw that her daughter had also died shortly after. I noticed that she had written a book about that experience as well. I thought I would never be able to read it. I didn’t even try until a couple months ago when I wanted help dealing with mortality, that of mine and my loved ones. I was looking for help with passing through stages of grief, with the feeling of panic. I was needing the voice of a wise elder to help me through a time in my life. Joan Didion was always that to me. I knew: This book. Now. And I was right.

Reading the book was healing for me. I was able to transform and metabolize feelings that were stuck in my body. Because she voiced them, I was able to feel them with all their complexity.

I didn’t expect the book to also be about aging.  The feelings of frailty that she describes hit me hard. The frailty that aging makes us feel. The way life feels more frail with each passing year; the way life is more frail. It makes one feel so very vulnerable.

The absolute loss of confidence that everything will be ok. The absolute confidence that everything will not be ok, that one will have to live through it and deal with it. Everyone talks about the arrogance of youth, but few talk about the feelings of vulnerability that come with aging. Suddenly, we are less sure of the ground under our feet, the way to the bathroom, the ability to depend on our bodies.

I suddenly awoke in the middle of the night and wondered if I could climb a mountain I have been climbing for years, or if I could still hike the steep hill down to the cove I love. These feelings came to me unexpectedly the night before these outings. I had trouble articulating them. They felt irrational. They were irrational. Then I read of a similar experience in Blue Nights.

Didion wonders if she will be able to get up out of a chair. She worries about falling down.

“I go to a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street to watch a run through of a play, a new production of a Broadway musical for which two close friends wrote the lyrics in the 1970s.

I sit on a folding metal chair. Behind me I hear voices I recognize (the two close friends and their collaborators, who wrote the book) but I feel too uncertain to turn around. The songs, some familiar and some new, continue. The reprises roll around. As I sit on the folding metal chair I begin to fear getting up. As the finale approaches, I experience outright panic. What if my feet no longer move? What if my muscles lock? . . . What if I stand up from this folding chair in this rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street and collapse, fall to the floor, the folding metal chair collapsing with me?”(BN 109).

Read Nasty Women Writers’ post: Joan Didion (1934-2021): All the Truth, No Slant

The Blue Nights of Didion’s life

The Blue Nights are a period of time in New York City where the sky is blue at twilight before and after summer solstice.

“You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cherenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English is was “the gloaming”(BN 3).

The book is the narrative of the gloaming of Didion’s life.

“This book is called “Blue Nights” because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning”(BN 3).

Blue Nights is memories of her daughter, their sweet family of three, her process with adopting her, raising her, memories of her and the houses they lived in, beautifully captured moments of the daughter when she was young and older, together with the questions that only come when we look back, when we remember and wonder, when we contemplate, when we grieve.

It is about the incredible strangeness of the experience of time and time passing; of people coming in and out of our lives, having an important impact on our lives due to the time we knew them. Because of the trajectory of Quintana’s life, Didion questions her own parenting, her own mothering. Could she have done something different? What did she do wrong? What did she miss?

The Didion-Dunne family’s lives were large. They were famous. They were writers and screenwriters. They were iconic. Joan Didion was iconic. They took their daughter with them when they traveled for work. Didion took her daughter with her to meetings with her agent, her editors, to book readings, on book tour. The three of them were a unit.

She punishes herself with thoughts: She worked too much. She is cold and detached. She distances herself from others. She was too close to her husband. Quintana felt shut out. It’s painful to read. You want to reach inside the book and hug her, to grab her hand and say, “there is nothing you could have done to prevent this.” The suffering is so enormous.

As a young adult, Quintana struggled with severe alcoholism, depression, and even suicidal ideation. Didion searches her own soul, wondering how she can help her daughter. In the recently published book, Notes to John, she chronicles a year (1999-2000) of psychotherapy by writing notes to her husband John after a session with her psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon. She details the conversation and things they cover. She writes to him like a letter. But it also feels like dictation.

The letters or notes in Notes to John were found compiled into an unpublished manuscript in one of the drawers in the file cabinet of Didion’s office after her death. Didion went to therapy because her daughter was worried about her, worried that she was sad and that she was lonely and that she needed someone to talk to.

Notes to John reveals the many ways that she and Dunne tried to help their daughter, including going to Al-Anon and AA meetings. Quintana continually falls off the wagon. Her binges are extreme and dangerous. The three of them talk openly about it. MacKinnon tries to help Didion learn how to take care of herself while living through this.

She comes to understand how her own fears may have impacted Quintana and how she can make changes in their current relationship to correct this. She also comes to understand that being more communicative about her feelings with Quintana, even about her fears and worries, can help their relationship as well.

The helplessness of a parent of an addict is revealed. Didion and Dunne and Quintana love each other so very deeply. The raw emotion cuts through the surface of the pages. I lost my breath.

Maybe she loved her too much? Its endless, the ways to blame herself.

Quintana Roo Dunne died in 2005 at the age of 39 after a series of hospitalizations for pneumonia, septic shock, a brain bleed, and five surgeries. Many believe her death and the way she died were a consequence of her alcoholism. Didion does not make this clear in Blue Nights which many view as dishonest, but frankly, it is none of our business.

The emotional risk that is parenting

Do we understand the risk we take when we become mothers? When we become parents? The absolute emotional devastation that wreaks havoc with our well-being and sense of stability when things go wrong, or even when they go right. How both child and adult can devastate each other with precision with one glance, action, or statement.

“When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, of what am I really afraid?”(BN 116).

Didion always wanted to be a mother.

In Blue Nights, she asks:

“Was I the problem? Was I always the problem?”(32).

Looking over photographs of the time they spent living in Malibu when Quintana was young, she writes:

“The clothes of course are familiar.
I had for awhile seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clothesline outside my office window.
I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines.
Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working.
So read the list of “mom’s sayings” that she posted one day in the garage, an artifact of the “club” she had started with a child who lived down the beach”(BN 34).

This phrase, shush I’m working, haunts her.

In one passage of Notes to John, MacKinnon reflects to her that she is a very caring person. She remarks that she never thought of herself that way.

“I said it had just never been my image of myself. It was tied up with my working, leaving home, the selfishness it took to . . .

“Do productive work?” He interrupted.

“In our culture this is something not many girls escape. Some deep idea that they should be the caring ones, the ones to stay home, the ones to take care of ill family members. You rejected that, but you didn’t escape feeling guilty about it”( NJ 230).

MacKinnon helps her understand that her writing was not only her livelihood, it is what gave her life meaning. He helps her allow that for herself. She accepts that she has a right to her own life even while her daughter struggles to have her own .

“You’d found something you thought could truly engage you, enable you to set your concerns to one side. . . .  It was the clearest thing about you. You needed to work, and work in a meaningful way. It’s not selfish. It’s crucial to your own survival” (NJ 173).

I am so glad Didion left us this unpublished manuscript, left us more details of her struggle than she felt able to share publicly while alive. She offers a lifeline for many: parents going through the same thing, humans trying to understand themselves, women struggling with trying to be good mothers. It was a very generous thing to do.

At one point, she asks MacKinnon:

“Did he mean, I asked, that when you come to understand your parents, you understand the demands you thought they placed on you, and in effect “forgive” them? And that’s the point at which you emotionally grow up?

‘That’s the point at which you become an integrated person, yes. The point at which you no longer feel guilty about not meeting whatever you imagined your parents’ expectations to be. And, further, the point at which you no longer feel guilty about how you did or did not fail your children’”(NJ 161).

I hope with all my heart that Didion arrived there. I have confidence that she did. And she continues to lead others there as well.

Joan Didion is a Nasty Woman Writer.

© Theresa C. Dintino 2025

Featured image by Annie Leibovitz, 1989

Works cited

Didion, Joan. Blue Nights. Knopf, 2011.

________.  Notes to John. Knopf, 2025.