Leftover Life

Joan Didion is an American original. Only this country could have produced her, as, for example, only France could have produced Edith Piaf. Two tiny birdlike women with outsized talents—one warbling away her woes in cabarets and bal musettes, the other trumpeting an uncompromising vision of American disaster and doom through the decades—see Slouching Towards Bethlehem; Play It As It Lays; Salvador; etc., etc., etc. Didion has now grown old and frail. She lives alone in New York City, eating ice cream in a forlorn attempt to keep her weight up, and she wonders what the future will bring.

She fears her loss of "momentum." Blue Nights, her fifteenth book, is an attempt to maintain it. It's also a book about her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, who died in 2005 at the age of thirty-nine, after nearly two years of being in and out of intensive-care units on both coasts. The cause of death was complications from a viral infection, but we also learn that Quintana drank too much and suffered from a borderline personality disorder—and that these conditions may have contributed to her infection.

Quintana was adopted as an infant by Didion and her late husband, John Gregory Dunne. They gave her the unusual name after seeing it on a map while visiting Mexico; Quintana Roo is one of the states on the Yucatan Peninsula. Quintana grew up in two of the priciest neighborhoods in Southern California, Brentwood and Malibu. She went to elite schools and had celebrity offspring for playmates. Yet Didion bridles at the notion that Quintana's childhood may have been privileged. "'Privilege,'" she tells us, "remains an area to which—when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later—I will not easily admit."

Still the early and middle chapters of this short book are filled with designer labels and fancy brand names, so much so that they get to be off-putting. We're told in short order of "a peach-colored cake from Payard," some "Christian Louboutin shoes," "Donald Brooks pastel linen dresses," "a flowered Porthault parasol," "Minton dinner plates," "the Saks bassinette," "Chanel suits," and "David Webb bracelets." What on earth is a David Webb bracelet? The author drops so many brand names, compulsively, that you begin to wonder if she's getting paid for each product mentioned.

Maybe it's a way of compensating for all she has lost: the ticking off of cherished material goods as a reminder to herself of the upside to the life she's led. She has always been pessimistic in her outlook, even in her earliest pieces in Slouching Towards Bethlehem—the essayist Joseph Epstein once sarcastically labeled her and New Yorker writer Renata Adler "the Sunshine Girls"—and her recent personal history has done nothing to cause her to question that stance. It's almost as if she had always known it would end this way: her husband dead at her feet of a heart attack in 2003, her daughter wasting away in numberless hospitals before dying in 2005, and now, finally, herself alone and lonely in a Manhattan apartment, with no one, absolutely no one, with a "need to know" in case something bad should happen to her.

Blue Nights is hard to classify. It's a memoir of sorts, a recalling of a deceased daughter's early life and untimely death, a record of a mother's doubts and fears about her performance as an adoptive parent, a cry from the heart against aging and solitude. But Quintana never really comes into focus in the book. We get glimpses of her as a winsome child—and there's a very winsome photo of her on the book's back cover—but the author never really settles into a depiction of her as a fully rounded human being. We're told that she drank too much, but we're never told why. We're told that she had a personality disorder, but we're never told how it manifested itself. Drinking too much? We...