Blue Nights Overview
Blue Nights is a memoir by Joan Didion which focuses primarily on the life and death of her daughter Quintana Roo, as well as Joan's experience of aging alone. The book features many flashback sequences of her earlier family life as well as the stories of the deaths of her husband, daughter, and friends. In the present day, Didion explores the inevitability of death and aging while still dealing with her personal grief and sense of loss. Blue Nights explores themes of death, grief, aging, adoption, and the failure to confront certainties.
Study Pack
The Blue Nights Study Pack contains:
Blue Nights Study Guide
Joan Didion Biographies (5)
1,763 words, approx. 6 pages
Although she is perhaps best known as a precise and graceful essayist, Joan Didion (born 1934) has also triumphed as a novelist and, with her husband, as a screenwriter.Joan Didion was born December 5...
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4,477 words, approx. 15 pages
Joan Didion was born on 5 December 1934 to Frank Reese and Eduene (Jerrett) Didion, a family whose roots in California's Central Valley go back five generations. She was raised in Sacramento as an Epi...
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10,634 words, approx. 36 pages
Ever since she first appeared on the literary scene in the early 1960s, Joan Didion has been identified as a California writer. Although her heart belongs to the provincial Sacramento of her girlhoo...
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4,804 words, approx. 17 pages
Joan Didion told an interviewer in 1992 that she "started out thinking things were pretty coherent. Then I was surprised when they weren't. I decided I better tell people." Didion tells stories of dis...
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11,668 words, approx. 39 pages
Biography Essay"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." These lines and the William Butler Yeats poem from which they come hold a special fascination for J...
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