From one of our most powerful writers, a function of stunning frankness about losing a girl. Richly textured with bits of her personal childhood and marriage with her hubby, John Gregory Dunne, and girl, Quintana Roo, this fresh reserve by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, doubts, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.

Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in NY seven years before. Today will be her wedding about Blue Evenings anniversary. This truth triggers vibrant snapshots of Quintana’s childhood-in Malibu, in Brentwood, at college in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her behalf little girl but also on her role being a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any mother or father might about how exactly she feels she failed either because cues weren’t taken or simply displaced. “How could I have missed that which was clearly there to be observed?” Finally, maybe we all stay unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her very own age, something she discovers hard to acknowledge, significantly less accept.

Blue Nights-the long, light night hours that signal the summertime solstice, “the opposite from the dying of the brightness, but also its caution”-like THE ENTIRE YEAR of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic publication of incisive and electrical honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.