Blue Nights

Blue Nights - Joan Didion [Non-fiction] My reading of this book follows right on the tails of 'The Year Of Magical Thinking' by the same author, in which her husband dies suddenly from a massive coronary. In that book, their daughter was hospitalized and in a coma from a severe infection. In this book, her daughter's poor health continues to deteriorate and medical problems keep arising. While this book is also a personal account about loss and pain, it seems to me, to be of a more 'distilled' nature -- almost being simultaneously a 3rd-person narrative and a 1st-person account, told by the one self-same person. Having lost her husband a short time before, the author seems to have adopted (or perhaps, it's adapted to) a more sterile and self-preserved approach to handling emotional and mental trauma. I am not exactly sure where this review is going... other than to conclude that these two books are somewhat akin to a grief support group, so others know that in how they feel and think, they are not alone.