Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Joan Didion's bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking focused on the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, also a successful writer and brother-in-law of Dominick Dunne. The book was published in 2005, just weeks before another tragedy struck Didion -- the death after a lingering illness of her daughter, Quintana Roo, at age 39.

Didion quickly updated the book with her daughter's death, but now she has written another memoir, this time focusing almost entirely on the daughter she adopted as an infant, the one who died, slowly, in a New York hospital. The book is Blue Nights and is written in typical Didion style -- short sentences and terse, obvious repetition for emphasis yet still concise.

The book is more about Didion's response to Quintana Roo's death than it is about Quintana Roo. It also is a mirror of the aging author's own frailties and vanities. She was 75 when she wrote this book in 2009.

Didion writes, for example, of realizing only late in life that she would not again be wearing the red suede sandals with 4-inch heels she once adored. Or the gold hoop earrings. Or the black cashmere leggings. Or the enameled beads. And she realizes that even the mention of such concerns in a book about her daughter's death "will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity."

And yet ... those realizations do not seem a reflection so much of vanity as a reflection of growing old -- and doing so alone, without spouse, without child, without some of the longtime friends Didion writes of having died as well.

As an aging woman myself, I know it's a lie to say I'm middle-aged unless I plan to live well past a century. When I broke my ankle and had to have surgery, I refused a walker despite the doctor's advice. I prefer not to tell my age, but my resume with the college graduation date is a dead-giveaway. I refuse to wear old women's shoes -- if you're under 50, you know the kind of shoes I mean. I toss all mail from the AARP. I'm not retired, so I surely cannot be that old, I tell myself. I do not request senior discounts at restaurants even when I qualify. I do not worry much about makeup and hairstyles. (I tell myself I am bohemian, not just too tired to fret over such things anymore.) But I do wish I could better conceal the increasingly visible veins in my hands, the scarred ankle that still hurts and becomes suddenly and dangerously stiff; the back teeth I am missing but cannot afford to replace.

So, vanity, you see, is not a quality limited to the Joan Didions and other rich and famous. Didion is just honest, candid about hers.

As an adoptive mother, I also identify with Didion's recollections of the fears regarding her daughter, adopted when Didion was 31, much younger than I was when I adopted my daughter from China.

"All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to be abandoned by their natural," Didion writes. "All adoptive parents, I do not need to be told, fear that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them."

Yes, I have feared such loss to the point that I borrowed money from someone I did not want to ask but did so because I felt my daughter's father and I needed to re-adopt her in this country and to do so very quickly -- just to be safe. My daughter has said don't leave me alone. -- Where are you? I can't find you, she has said. -- I was only in the other room or the back yard.

Didion recalls her daughter, as a child, speaking of her "other mommy," the biological mother. The same words have come from my daughter, who's even spoken of her four sets of grandparents -- if you count the ones in China, that is.

Ultimately, of course, Didion did lose her daughter, not to the biological mother, not to a court or to a foster parent, but to death -- at a far too young age.

If a memoir can be judged by believability, by truth, by remembrances of all things -- even the embarrassing -- Blue Nights certainly qualifies. It is not a depressing book, but it is a work that at times is so realistic it hurts, especially if the reader's life bears even small resemblances to Didion's.