A mere twenty months after Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, Didion’s only child, Quintana Roo Dunne, contracted pneumonia, lapsed into septic shock and passed away. She was only 39 years old. Didion grappled with the first death in her 2005 bestseller, The Year of Magical Thinking. Now, with her new memoir Blue Nights, she turns to her child’s passing, to a parent’s worst fear realized. In this short film shot by her nephew, director Griffin Dunne, Didion reads from Blue Nights. The scene opens with memories from her daughter’s wedding and ends with some big existential questions and the refrain, “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”
This “audiobook for the eyes,” as Griffin Dunne calls it, runs six plus minutes. The actual Blue Nights audio book is now available on Audible.
A big thanks goes to @opedr for sending the Didion clip our way…
Reading “Blue Nights” and “Notes to John,” I am struck by how different the lives of the Didion-Dunne family might have been if their daughter had been evaluated for FASD — Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. We have known about the effects of prenatal exposure to alcohol since the early 1970’s. A PubMed search reveals thousands of published articles on the (often hidden) brain and body damage that can develop from prenatal exposure to alcohol. Yet it seems that this common condition — affecting as many as 1 in 20 U.S. schoolchildren — was never considered. The anguish and guilt that Joan Didion relates in her later works — could some of this have been lessened had the clinicians and other professionals in their lives offered early diagnosis, and, if needed, FASD-informed supports?