Blue Nights
A Memoir
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Blue Nights
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Narrated by:
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Kimberly Farr
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By:
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Joan Didion
About this listen
From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana’s wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana’s childhood—in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed, either because cues were not taken or perhaps displaced. “How could I have missed what was clearly there to be seen?” Finally, perhaps we all remain unknown to each other. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.
Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profoundly moving.
©2011 Joan Didion (P)2011 Random HouseListeners also enjoyed...
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Complaining about her dead mom.
- By Erik Hermansen on 11-23-14
By: Meghan Daum
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Bitter in the Mouth
- By: Monique Truong
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 52
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 41
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Story4 out of 5 stars 43
Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70’s and 80’s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” are the cruel, mysterious last words that Linda’s grandmother ever says to her.
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2 out of 5 stars
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"Tasting Words" made this hard to hear!
- By Kate Anderson on 11-06-11
By: Monique Truong
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Native Country of the Heart
- A Memoir
- By: Cherríe Moraga
- Narrated by: Cherríe Moraga
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 56
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story5 out of 5 stars 52
Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The lives of Cherrie and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline.
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5 out of 5 stars
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a must read for all chicanx
- By Rachel Barnett on 04-28-19
By: Cherríe Moraga
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Where the Past Begins
- A Writer's Memoir
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 182
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 162
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Story4 out of 5 stars 158
Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
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A Fine Romance
- By: Candice Bergen
- Narrated by: Candice Bergen
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 561
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 485
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 488
A Fine Romance begins with Bergen's charming first husband, French director Louis Malle, whose huge appetite for life broadened her horizons and whose occasional darkness never diminished their love for each other. But her real romance begins when she discovers overpowering love for her daughter after years of ambivalence about motherhood.
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4 out of 5 stars
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up the speed to 1.5 and Candace sounds way better
- By Susan M. Mitchell on 06-03-15
By: Candice Bergen
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Mother Daughter Me
- A Memoir
- By: Katie Hafner
- Narrated by: Katie Hafner
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 55
The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a "year in Provence" with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoe, Katie's teenage daughter. Katie and Zoe had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a 77-year-old woman set in her ways....
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5 out of 5 stars
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Listen and be swept away!
- By Barbara Quick on 06-02-22
By: Katie Hafner
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This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,712
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,530
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,513
Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto examines her deepest commitments: to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Together, these essays, previously published in The Atlantic, Harper, Vogue, and The Washington Post, form a resonant portrait of a life lived with loyalty and with love.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Entertaining, engrossing, and elucidative essays
- By Bonny on 01-07-14
By: Ann Patchett
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The Blood Doctor
- By: Barbara Vine
- Narrated by: Robert Powell
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 86
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 72
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Story4 out of 5 stars 72
The First Lord Nanther, expert in blood diseases, particularly the royal disease of Heamophilia, and favoured physician to Queen Victoria, clearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. But when his great-grandson, Martin Nanther begins to research his life for a biography, the Martin comes to suspect that his great-grandfather’s old records conceal more than they reveal.
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5 out of 5 stars
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clever, excellent storytelling
- By connie on 07-09-11
By: Barbara Vine
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 83
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 69
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 69
Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 219
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 187
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Story4 out of 5 stars 186
In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
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Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 158
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 143
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 139
Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.
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2 out of 5 stars
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A better way to narrate a book about death?
- By MAUREEN on 10-21-13
By: Katy Butler
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Bettyville
- By: George Hodgman
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 371
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 332
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Story4 out of 5 stars 332
When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself - an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook - in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure - the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict...
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1 out of 5 stars
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Title Should Be Georgeville-It's All About George
- By Sara on 10-08-15
By: George Hodgman
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Grief Cottage
- By: Gail Godwin
- Narrated by: Jacob York
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 124
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 110
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Story4 out of 5 stars 109
The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from best-selling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin. After his mother's death, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there 30 years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Character story or ghost story ?
- By RueRue on 12-18-17
By: Gail Godwin
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The Trip to Echo Spring
- On Writers and Drinking
- By: Olivia Laing
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 127
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 118
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 119
In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great Narration!!!!!! Great story about 20 Century make writer who suffer with alcoholism. If you like this topic and want more
- By Pamela Abbey on 04-25-21
By: Olivia Laing
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Flesh Wounds
- By: Richard Glover
- Narrated by: Richard Glover
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 34
A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Such a Meaningful Reflection
- By Awarenessing on 11-28-15
By: Richard Glover
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Modern Loss
- Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome.
- By: Rebecca Soffer, Gabrielle Birkner
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 44
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it's clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let's face it: Most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We're awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Not What I Was Expecting
- By Bessie Mae on 03-01-23
By: Rebecca Soffer, and others
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The Year of Magical Thinking
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- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 4,424
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,135
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Story4 out of 5 stars 3,146
"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
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By: Joan Didion
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The White Album
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- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Susan Varon
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall