Child’s death makes for a bittersweet read

Blue Nights by Joan Didion, HarperCollins Publishers, $34.99. Reviewed by Angela Fitchett.

The late Joan Didion’s last book, the memoir Blue Nights, is her attempt to work through the death of her beloved only child, Quintana, who died after a long and puzzling series of illnesses in her 30s.

The title is taken from the name given to the twilight hours in the weeks before the summer solstice. Blue nights are not the end of summer but the signal for its end.

Didion’s memoir goes back through her life with Quintana, trying to find the ‘‘blue nights’’ in their life as a family.

In this search, Didion writes about Quintana’s adoption, her teenage years and the family’s busy life as identities in the literary and celebrity world of New York and California in the sixties and seventies.

But this memoir is about Didion as much as it is about Quintana. In The Year of Magical Thinking Didion attempted to come to terms with the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne; in Blue Nights she writes about her own frailty, about age and illness and life coming to an end.

Her prose is as spare and beautiful as always as she moves from memory to memory in a search for her family’s specific ‘‘blue nights’’.

While not a cheerful read, Blue Nights will reward your attention.