Blue is (not) the warmest colour: contradictions of grieving in Joan Didion's Blue Nights

Six years after publishing her acclaimed memoir of spousal loss, i.e. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), in which she memorably wrote about the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion returned to the field of (auto)thanatography. This time Didion produced a devastating account of the death of her daughter Quintana, who died at the age of thirty-nine, only twenty months after John. However, Blue Nights (2011) turned out not to be a conventional memoir of loss which would easily succumb to the laws of the genre. On the contrary, instead of exclusively paying tribute to the memory (and life) of her daughter, or trying to testify to the process of grieving, Quintana's demise invited Didion to turn her attention to her own self and address such issues as ageing and loneliness, parenthood, displacement, as well as her own impending death. Consequently, Didion wrote the most paradigmatic form of autobiography, which, as Nancy K. Miller famously stated, is an act of "writing against death twice: the other's and one's own" (Miller 1994: 12). The aim of this paper is to discuss Blue Nights as a narrative of grief and/or death. The conceptual framework of this analysis will be provided by an inquiry into the (titular) colour blue and its cultural contexts.