No one, least of all Joan Didion, would consider The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf, 2005), her National Book Award–winning memoir about coping with the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, a happy book. In fact it’s a harrowing journey through a blasted heath of grief and loss, with denial (he wasn’t really sick, he isn’t really dead, no, not really) her only solace. But the writing itself was healing. Didion has never been a great talker—she’s referred to herself as “neurotically inarticulate”—but is, as critics have repeatedly pointed out over the past forty years, peerless on the page, blessed with a fluid yet miraculously compressed prose style that somehow melds the thunderclap clarity of Hemingway and the sinuous depths of Henry James. In eighty-eight fever-pitch days at the typewriter, she wrestled with Dunne’s ghost, emerging, as always, victorious, or close enough. A chaos of emotions was brought into a semblance of order. There was closure, a cauterizing of wounds, a dulling of pain, even a measure of peace.

Not this time. Not with her new memoir, Blue Nights, published this month by Knopf, in which she returns to the subject of the loss of a loved one: her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who soon followed her father into the dark, but whose death was not to be talked or thought of, not with any great rigor, and certainly not written about. “I wouldn’t want to have a long conversation about Quintana’s death,” Didion told New York magazine in late 2005. But about two years ago, she did have that conversation—with herself. It was one of those dreaded talks, like the one with your parents, when you’re a teenager, about the facts of life, or when you confront a friend about going into rehab. There was, for one thing, the complication of Quintana’s privacy. Didion wondered whether she had the right to write about Quintana, to reveal her secrets, including the circumstances of her adoption as an infant, her history of emotional and mental problems (including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and borderline personality disorder), and the details of the cascade of illnesses (brain hematoma, pneumonia, septic shock, a coma) that claimed her life at the age of thirty-nine.

“The Year of Magical Thinking was about my life together with John, and it didn’t deal much with Quintana, in part because I wasn’t comfortable with that—Quintana’s life was her life,” Didion says one recent afternoon in her apartment on New York City’s Upper East Side, her voice as small and reedy as her petite, famously frail physique. “But after a while, I just started it, and once I’d made that decision, I knew I had to shake off that doubt. It was time to think about Quintana, and about our relationship. It was time.”

What Didion realized—after finally training on herself the steely, pitiless gaze that in earlier years had stripped the armor off icons like Ronald Reagan and Bob Woodward, leaving them naked as deluded emperors—was that she had achieved, as Quintana’s mother, something a good deal less than perfection. She had failed, as mothers often do, to appreciate the complexity of her daughter’s often surprisingly dark personality, aspects of which manifested themselves early. When Quintana was five, the Dunnes came home to their beach house in Malibu, California, to discover that she had placed a telephone call to Camarillo, a nearby state psychiatric hospital, to inquire about what she needed to do if she was going crazy. On another occasion she called 20th Century Fox to ask what she needed to do to be a star. In her early teens, she produced “a novel I’m writing just to show you,” featuring a girl named Quintana who, believing herself pregnant, tells her parents. “They said they would provide the abortion,” the budding novelist wrote of her fictional parents, “but after that they did not even care about her any more.”

And yet Didion—as she came to see while writing Blue Nights—persisted in treating her beautiful blonde daughter as simply a normal child, hardly more than a doll in a dollhouse, there to be fed, clothed, nursed, and dearly loved but not to wonder much about, not to suspect of roiling, vertiginous depths. “Quintana had more self-knowledge, even early on, than I ever had of her,” she says now in a halting voice. “Did I fail her? Totally. Obviously. I thought of her as a baby, whereas very clearly, if you look at the things that she was doing when she was four and five and six years old, she was not a baby, even then. Even then, she had these dark feelings, dark thoughts.” As if in her own defense, Didion points out a framed photograph of John and Quintana when she was four or five. “Look at her! She doesn’t look like a child with dark feelings, does she?”

She doesn’t. In the photo, Quintana looks like a doll in a dollhouse, albeit one with—if you didn’t know she was adopted—what appear to be her mother’s eyes: cool, sober, steady, disinclined to look away.

In this flowing, nonlinear, often elliptical memoir, Didion recounts her memories of Quintana throughout their lives together, rediscovering—or, more often, discovering for the first time—the significance latent in small episodes, fragments of dialogue, moods, and moments. All of it is poignant, though not all depressing; there are, amid the darkness, pinpricks of light. “In a lot of ways, given all the problems she had, I didn’t give her credit for being as on top of things as she was,” Didion says now about her daughter. Elsewhere she fashions a gauzy shroud of remembrances of others, many now dead: friends from the movies (including actress Natasha Richardson, who died after a freak skiing accident in 2009 and whose mother, Vanessa Redgrave, starred in Didion’s Broadway adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking), Chicago mob fixer Sidney Korshak, and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. But she keeps returning to Quintana, craving her presence, haunted by her non-presence, filled and refilled like a chalice at Communion, replenished by memories that are forever running out.

Unlike The Year of Magical Thinking, then, Blue Nights was not a therapeutic experience for its author. Not exactly. “Well, obviously it was, in a sense—anytime you get something out of your hidden mind into your front mind, I guess you could call that therapeutic,” Didion says quietly. “But in Magical Thinking, dealing with John’s death, I didn’t come to any negative conclusions about my own part in it. I didn’t come out of it thinking that I was in some way more responsible, more culpable, than I had thought. It wasn’t my fault. But to some extent, I came away from this book about Quintana thinking that it was about my failure, and that I had not appreciated that it had been my failure. It’s less finished than Magical Thinking, more sad, more not right. And in Magical Thinking, although I may not have realized it, I was working my way toward a satisfying resolution. If someone dies a natural death and you think that you could not have in any way affected the outcome, you feel that it’s resolved in a satisfactory way. Quintana’s death…” Didion’s hands, fragile and ridged with dark veins, float in the air, describing something that words cannot. “Her death I can’t resolve in a satisfactory way,” she says, her voice just above a whisper. “There’s too much business left unfinished between us. That can never be finished.”

She finished the book, though, and is bracing herself, at the age of seventy-six, for a round of press interviews for which she has no prepared script, no “cool way,” as she puts it, to answer the questions she knows will come. And although Blue Nights proved far more difficult to write than The Year of Magical Thinking—instead of eighty-eight days, it took nearly a year to produce the 188 pages—she seems to take a certain grim satisfaction in the fact that she confronted head-on what was perhaps the most painful aspect of her own history. If her procrastination in writing about Quintana was symptomatic of a fear of revealing secrets—not only her daughter’s but also her own—in the end she got down to business, as she always does, and spared no one, least of all herself.   

“I’ve always had the sense that if there was ever any doubt about whether I should deal with something, then I have to deal with it,” she says, some strength reentering her voice. “The image that always comes to my mind is that if you keep your eye on the rattlesnake, the rattlesnake can’t get you.”

Didion has spent the past half century staring down that rattlesnake. Raised in Sacramento, California, by conservative Republican parents with deep roots in that state, and educated at Berkeley, Didion got her start as a professional writer by winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue, for which she then wrote for two years in New York City in the mid-1950s. Ivan Obolensky published her first novel, Run River, in 1963, and she later married Dunne, with whom she moved back to California—to Los Angeles, with the thought that the pair would make a living writing for television. They never accomplished much on the small screen, but did find success writing for the movies, producing screenplays for The Panic in Needle Park (1971); Play It as It Lays (1972, based on her novel of the same title, published in 1970 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux); the Barbra Streisand remake of A Star Is Born (1976); True Confessions with Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall (1981); and Up Close & Personal with Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford (1996). After Play It as It Lays, subsequent Didion novels included A Book of Common Prayer (Simon & Schuster, 1977), Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (Knopf, 1996).

Didion always thought of herself primarily as a novelist, but also found herself writing more and more nonfiction—so much so that, as her friend Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker writer, puts it, “People probably think of her first and foremost as an essayist, and rightly so, given her output.” That output includes a shelf full of in-depth reportage and incisive criticism written for a vast array of magazines and collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), The White Album (Simon & Schuster, 1979), Salvador (Simon & Schuster, 1983), Miami (Simon & Schuster, 1987), Political Fictions (Knopf, 2001), and Where I Was From (Knopf, 2003). “A lot of it was a question of making a living,” she says now. “John and I wrote for magazines to support ourselves, and we had magazines then that actually paid a relatively good fee. You could make a decent living at it, especially if there were two of you. But, yes, I always thought of it as something that was getting in the way of a novel, rather than as something that I specifically set out to do. On the other hand, I liked doing pieces for magazines. I liked doing the reporting, I liked talking to people, I liked the whole process. So I never minded doing it. And then at some point I started writing longer pieces, in fact short books, like the ones on El Salvador and Miami. So I went in that direction.”

In that context, Shelley Wanger, Didion’s longtime editor at Knopf—they began working together on The Last Thing He Wanted—sees her as sharing certain characteristics with another writer in multiple modes, Susan Sontag. “Sontag is of course best known for her amazing essays, but until she wrote her novels, she didn’t feel she’d accomplished anything,” Wanger says. “Joan is a bit like that, although less so—in part, I think, because her voice is so clear and so devastating, and carries through from one book to another, whatever the medium is. She’s always herself.”

The nature of that voice, for all its universally acknowledged distinction, remains elusive. For decades readers and critics have professed their reverence for Didion’s style, while struggling to locate the source of its power. For Robert Silvers, the veteran editor of the New York Review of Books (which first published some of Didion’s work, including the Salvador and Miami pieces as well as her seminal essay “Sentimental Journeys,” about the infamous case of New York City’s Central Park jogger), Didion’s great stylistic achievement is a seeming emotional detachment that can’t quite suppress the passion lying just beneath.

“One of the most important aspects of her brilliance is the tone that she achieves of a cool, detached voice, a voice of a particularly acute observer who refuses to accept nearly anything at first glance but insists on probing behind conventional impressions,” Silvers says. “And behind that voice, for all its factuality and coolness, is an underlying tone of intense moral concern, and feelings of anger, of indignation, of sympathy, and, in some cases, an awareness that she has come upon something new, something that has not been perceived by others. The tone of the writing does not call attention to itself and yet it’s distinctively hers. And that is what I think is the great power of her writing.”

The late John Leonard, in his introduction to We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a collection of Didion’s nonfiction published by Everyman’s Library in 2006, put forth a different idea. “I have been trying forever to figure out why her sentences are better than mine or yours…something about cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, icepick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than it ought to be, as if to square a sandbox for a Sphinx.”

Then there’s the matter of Didion’s fierce intellectual independence, which has at times led her to assume the role of crusader. In the case of the Central Park jogger, for example, the nearly immediate consensus was that the attack, in which a young woman was severely assaulted, had been made by a group of young black men who were arrested and then convicted. “Joan looked into this case, simply as an observing citizen, and read all the materials that were emerging about it,” Silvers says. “She at that time was very skeptical—skeptical about the evidence, skeptical about the mood that had formed in the city so quickly, skeptical about the guilt of these young men. She examined the evidence and saw that there were many gaps in it. We published that piece, and many people criticized it for not accepting the official version of what happened. Some years later, the person who actually committed the crime confessed to having done it, and it was not any of the persons who had been arrested. Finally, DNA evidence from the person who confessed was able to bring about a reversal, and the young men were freed. It was a case of failure of the police and failure of justice. And Joan, just by observing the facile psychology with which the crime was approached, and looking carefully at the evidence, anticipated that there was something deeply wrong. It was an amazing example of Joan’s acuity, her insight, and her willingness not to accept received views but to probe the very nature of official claims.”

And although Didion has been, for better and worse, closely identified with California for much of her career, she has also been one of its most relentless critics and debunkers, as in Where I Was From, in which she set a torch to the mythopoetic cant about the state’s glorious past and present. In Play It as It Lays, she sent up the free-floating angst and dissociation of Hollywood, and elsewhere described L.A. as “a city not only largely conceived as a series of real estate promotions but largely supported by a series of confidence games, a city…afloat on motion pictures and junk bonds and the B-2 Stealth bomber.”

Just as interesting, perhaps, is the fact that Didion had begun writing Where I Was From many years before she finished it. She put away her notes for the book in frustration, taking them up again two decades later—after, she came to recognize, the deaths of her parents. “It was quite an exhilarating book to do, because I had started writing a book like that, a long time before, and had been unable to go any further with it,” she recalls. “When I went back to it, I realized that the reason I had been unable to go any further was that my mother and father were still alive, and I could not bring myself to write a book about California that denied everything they thought about California—which was that it was a triumph of individual achievement. In fact, it was basically bought and paid for by the federal government, but this was not a message that would have pleased my parents.”

Even so, Didion has had, over the years, her moments of longing for her home state, which she left for good in 1988 in favor of New York. For years, according to Trillin, she returned to her parents’ house in Sacramento to finish her books. And the same year of her move to New York, back in L.A. on a bus with other journalists covering the Jesse Jackson campaign, she found herself in tears at the beauty of the twilight, suffused with the reflected glow of the sun setting on the Pacific. “We were just leaving the airport and it was that moment where the sun hits the water, and it was so beautiful that I cried all the way to South Central,” she recalls with a slightly exasperated smile. “I cried because I didn’t have this anymore, and I thought to myself, ‘What madness—you’re crying over the view between LAX and South Central!’”

And with that, Joan Didion laughs.

***

The quality of the light at dusk, wherever she is, matters more than ever to Didion, a fact reflected in the title of her new book. As she explains in a prologue, the golden twilight of subtropical Los Angeles becomes, in New York, “the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.”

During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights come to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. 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.

As poignant as her reckoning with the legacy of Quintana is, it’s also intertwined with, and indivisible from, a sense that writing about Quintana’s death was as an invitation for Didion to contemplate her own eventual passing. “As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all, at least not children per se, at least not children qua children: their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death,” she reflects early on in the memoir. Later: “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.” Later still: “What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?” The ultimate fear, she realizes, is not what has been lost—Quintana, John, their lives together—because it is, after all, gone. The fear, instead, “is for what is still to be lost.”

It’s true, Didion admits with seeming reluctance, that she has a will, and that she knows where her ashes will be interred (next to John and Quintana at the columbarium of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine). She entertains less than she used to, she concedes, “because I’m tired.” Despite the phone’s occasional ring and the discreet presence of staff, her apartment, filled with books and memories and photographs, such as the one of John and Quintana in the bloom of youth, is quieter now than it’s ever been.

And yet this is one rattlesnake that Didion is not yet quite prepared to eyeball. “I think I’m ready, but no, I’m not preparing,” she says. “I can’t even conceive of preparing. I’m not that out front with myself about mortality. No, I can’t.”

“She’s tougher than she looks,” says Trillin, who has known her for half a century. “Of course, almost anyone is tougher than she looks. But she really is tough, she’s always working, always looking to the future.”

Indeed, Didion works most days—she’s mapping out some new pieces for Silvers at the New York Review of Books and even has some old notes for a new novel that, as she puts it, “might at least be entertaining to read”—and goes to physical therapy to strengthen her nerves. Yes, she’s painfully thin, but then that’s always been true. “In fact, everyone who’s known me for a long time thinks that I’ve gained weight,” she says with a smile. “Actually, I’ve gained maybe three or four pounds since I was in my twenties. I wear all the same size clothes as I did then.”

But as she says it, outside her window, the light is turning blue. 

Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.