Joan Didion’s publisher Knopf released a new edition of Blue Nights earlier this month. It’s an ebook which has been supplemented with video content made by Didion’s nephew, the actor and director Griffin Dunne. He filmed the writer reading chapters 1, 2 and 7 aloud. In October 2011, we posted the videos here on Joan-Didion.info.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “enhanced e-books—which have multimedia features such as audio, video, pop-up graphics, 3-D images and animation—are being touted as the next frontier in the digital-books landscape.”

The enhanced ebook is available for purchase from Amazon.com. (It is not available in Europe.)

The Los Angeles Library Foundation has released a video of the event, which is embedded below.

Dunne describes it as “an audiobook for the eyes.” Visual interest is added by an array of family photographs which are cut together to illustrate Didion’s lines as she speaks them.

The Daily Beast notes that the film may be extended into a fully-fledged documentary “in the near future.” Three clips of the existing film have been released so far, which are embedded below.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

[...]
Chapter 7

Photo: Annie Leibovitz/Vanity Fair

Christopher Hitchens briefly reviews Joan Didion’s upcoming memoir in the October issue of Vanity Fair.

“Didion, here slightly syncopating in the Bob Dylan manner, has striven with intense dignity and courage in Blue Nights to deepen and extend the effect of The Year of Magical Thinking,” he notes.

Hitchens reads this work as a testament to the importance of memory in the face of death: “[A]s long as one person is condemned to remember, there can still be pain and loss and anguish.”

The act of remembering defies death’s potential to make the dead dissappear without trace. As Didion writes:

Vanish.

Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.

Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.

Go back into the blue.

I myself placed her ashes in the wall.

I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.

I know what it is I am now experiencing.

I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.

The fear is not for what is lost.

What is lost is already in the wall.

What is lost is already behind the locked doors.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

You may see nothing still to be lost.

Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

The review also includes a portrait (above) of Didion taken by Annie Leibovitz in the living room of the writer’s New York City apartment.

The crisp, distinctive voice of Vanessa Redgrave, star of stage and screen, will be heard on the audiobook recording of Blue Nights.

Close followers of Joan Didion’s work will recall that Redgrave was the actress cast to play the role of Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play when it opened on Broadway in March, 2007.

Then, in 2009, Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter, the actress Natasha Richardson died in a skiing accident in Canada. The tragic circumstances appeared to mirror those presented in Didion’s play, which covered a timeline of greater breadth than The Year of Magical Thinking, the memoir it was based on, and encompassed the fact of the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.

The resemblance of their personal tragedies seemed to give rise to a close friendship between the two women. Didion was reported at the time to have visited Richardson in hospital in New York shortly before she died. She also attended the premiere of Driving Miss Daisy, the first play Redgrave appeared in following Richardson’s death.

And now, Redgrave is to narrate the audiobook version of Blue Nights, Didion’s new memoir which takes Quintana as its principle subject. In it, Didion interrogates her own role in her daughter’s life and death, and attempts to express the emotions felt by a parent grieving for her child.

“The fear is not for what is lost. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her,” Didion writes.

These words will doubtless take on an even greater charge when spoken by Redgrave.

The audiobook will be released on the 1st of November, 2011, the same day as the print edition, and will retail for $16.50 on Amazon.

Joan Didion in 1996. Photo: The Los Angeles Times

Vintage Books has provided Joan-Didion.info with the particulars of Joan Didion’s upcoming book tour promoting Blue Nights. In turn, we have added the information to our Readings and Events page.

The full details of some events are not yet available, so we recommend that readers bookmark the page and check back for the latest updates.

Didion will appear at nine events in six cities across the United States, and at one event in Toronto, Canada. The first scheduled event, a reading at the Barnes and Noble on Union Square in New York, will coincide with the American release of the book on the 1st of November, 2011.

British and Irish fans of Didion’s work will have to wait until November 4th, 2011 to buy a copy. This will be followed by the publication of the memoir in Australia on November 8th, 2011. No tour dates are planned for these markets.

Photo: The New York Times

In the 1980s, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne were commissioned by the producer Elliott Krastner to write the screenplay for an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s novel, The Deer Park. In a caprice of the Hollywood system, the film never made it into production.

However, The Daily reports that Cassian Elwes, Krastner’s stepson, recently inherited the rights to the movie script, and plans to develop it. Elwes, who was the co-executive producer of Blue Valentine, is working on the project with fellow producers Matt Palmieri and Michael Mailer, the son of the author.

“It’s one of my favorite books of my dad’s,” Mailer told The Observer. “It’s an evergreen story and I’m very excited about doing it.”

Didion has long been a champion of Norman Mailer’s work, and of The Deer Park in particular, writing in The New York Times:

It is one of those testimonies to the tenacity of self-regard in the literary life that large numbers of people remain persuaded that Norman Mailer is no better than their reading of him. They condescend to him, they dismiss his most original work in favor of the more literal and predictable rhythms of “The Armies of the Night”; they regard “The Naked and the Dead” as a promise later broken and every book since as a quick turn for his creditors, a stalling action, a spangled substitute, tarted up to deceive, for the “big book” he cannot write. In fact he has written this “big book” at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with “The Deer Park” and he wrote it a second time in 1963 with “An American Dream” and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with “Why Are We in Vietnam?”

Mailer, Elwes and Palmeiri are ambitious about the level of talent they think it will attract. According to The Observer, they have already proposed the project to a few major directors. “We’re going to aim after the A-List,” Mailer said.

Photo: Jessica Hill / AP

Yale University awarded Joan Didion an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at commencement on Monday.

Richard Levine, the president of the university, conferred the honor. He praised Didion’s influence on two generations of writers and the high standard her work continues to set for American prose.

“In unflinching prose, you explore themes of love and loss, politics and place, social disorder and the search for meaning,” Levin said. “As a columnist, essayist, and novelist, you have captured the magic and mystery of life and death.”

Honorary degrees were also given to film director Martin Scorsese and peace envoy George Mitchell.

The Kirkus Reviews website calls it a “slim somber classic” in which Didion “considers her daughter’s death and her inevitable own.”

The short review includes a few revealing details about the content of book, including the following:

Didion tests Quintana’s childhood poems and scribblings for hints of her own failings as a mother, and she voices her helplessness at the hands of doctors. “I put the word ‘diagnosis’ in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a ‘diagnosis’ led to a ‘cure,’ ” she writes. The author also ponders her own mortality, and she does so with heartbreaking specificity. A metal folding chair, as she describes it, is practically weaponized, ready to do her harm should she fall out of it; a fainting spell leaves her bleeding and helpless on the floor of her bedroom.

In further news, the cover design of Blue Nights has been released by Knopf, which will publish the work in Canada and the US. The letters that spell “NO ROO” are picked out in a lighter blue font in a twist on the design of Didion’s previous memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which highlighted Didion’s late husband’s name, John. Quintana’s full name was Quintana Roo Dunne.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2005, Didion noted her satisfaction with that book cover, designed by Carol Devine Carson, the Art Director at Knopf. It is not clear whether Devine Carson also worked on Blue Nights, though it seems extremely likely that this is the case.