When she fractured her patella in March, Joan Didion was forced to cancel her April book tour dates. However, she has now scheduled several appearances in the month of June.

She will visit Fairfield University in Connecticut on the 7th, the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on the 19th and the Hartford Stage in Connecticut on the 28th of June.

Zach Noland contributed reporting. 

Photo: Tyler Anderson/National

Joan Didion has cancelled the dates for her Blue Nights book tour in April due to injury. She broke her ‘patella’ or kneecap by banging her leg while dining at a restaurant, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times.

Didion broke her patella.

Didion had been scheduled to partake in a conversation with Mona Simpson, the novelist and sister of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, on the UCLA campus on April 14. She had also committed to visit Washington-Lee High School in Arlington County, Virginia on April 19.

Paul Bogaards, a Knopf publicist, noted that Didion has been advised by her doctor to take it easy, and that she has been fitted with a leg brace.

Ticket holders for the UCLA event may seek a refund from their point of purchase. The Arlington County event was not ticketed.

Joan Didion reads to Quintana in 1969. Photo: The Los Angeles Times

Joan Didion has been nominated for an Indies Choice award for Blue Nights. The grief memoir, which addressed the death of Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, was published in November 2011.

Others who were nominated in the non-fiction category include Robert K. Massie for his celebrated biography of Catherine the Great and Andre Dubus III for Townie: A Memoir.

The award is given out by the American Booksellers Association. Independent booksellers who are members of the Association will vote during the month of March, and the winners will be announced on April 5, 2012.

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.