Mary-Kay Wilmers writes:

Blue Nights, a more anxious, self-questioning book than The Year of Magical Thinking, is about fear, Didion’s and Quintana’s principally: fear of being abandoned, of time passing, of losing control, of dying; and about the memory of a time between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s when Didion and Dunne lived in California and Quintana was growing up; a charmed time when ‘there had been agapanthus, lilies of the Nile, intensely blue starbursts that floated on long stalks’; when children might develop a liking for caviar; and there were birthdays at which rafts of balloons were released to drift over Hollywood Hills; a time when fear was glossed over or unrecognised and Didion was a mother who wrote books:

Fourth Estate | Paperback 208 pp. |ISBN: 9780007432905