[supertofu]

Blue Nights by Joan Didion, in which she grieves the death of her forty-something daughter, just a few years after her abusive husband died suddenly from a heart attack.

The contrast between her gorgeous but also coldly precise writing, the grieving mother vs the lauded writer, the tension of watching her muse (very delicately, very distantly) on the nature of being an adoptive mother and wondering as a reader: what sort of wounds did Joan Didion pass on to her daughter and what wounds did her daughter inherit from her biological family, the contrast between the vibrant streets of New York and the cold hospital where her daughter was dying in a coma, knowing as a reader that this writer had just gone through the grief of losing her husband a few years earlier...

It was haunting, beautiful, and, naturally, a little voyeuristic by its very nature. I still think about it to this day.

[dyauspitr]

I couldn’t relate to a single line in that book even though I’m a father to two daughters. Very directed towards women.

[supertofu]

This is an interesting comment. I think part of the mystique of Joan Didion's persona and her autobiographical writing is the fact that she is a wildly, and fascinatingly, unrelatable person, regardless of the reader's gender.

The point of her writing generally isn't to reflect to reader. And what makes her autobiographical writing so compelling is the the way she dissects her own supremely unrelatable life and emotional landscape.