“Relative Stranger”

A writer sifts through the wreckage of her schizophrenic sister's short life. Can she penetrate the helter-skelter chaos to understand what was going on in her mind?

By Emily Weinstein

Topics:Memoirs, Mental Illness, Books

“Trying to see a person through the fog of serious mental illness is a little bit like trying to make sense of someone speaking to you in a language of which you have only a basic grasp,” Mary Loudon writes of her relationship to her schizophrenic sister, Catherine. “You do a lot of filling in.”

Schizophrenia has a vast stable of symptoms, among them asociality — an avoidance of the company of others. For Catherine Loudon, this meant an inability to maintain relationships that demanded anything of her at all. Having suffered a serious breakdown during a stay in India in her early 20s, Catherine had more or less estranged herself from her family by the time of her death at age 47, maintaining scarce contact through phone calls and cheery, disjointed letters. When she died, none of the Loudons had known she’d been diagnosed with cancer. She even told the hospital staff there was no next of kin.

The news of Catherine’s death is where Mary Loudon’s memoir, “Relative Stranger: Piecing Together a Life Plagued by Madness,” begins. Structured as a detective story, “Relative Stranger” chronicles Loudon’s attempt to learn what her oldest sister’s life had been like in the 11 years before she died. Loudon, a British author who’s written nonfiction books about religious life in England, had for years been aware and fearful of the ways mental illness held sway over her sister’s behavior.

Catherine displayed many of the “positive” symptoms of schizophrenia — “positive” in that they create delusions and sounds and images where nothing exists to be heard or seen, as opposed to “negative” symptoms, which are characterized by a lack of normal sensations or social functions. She had hallucinations. She believed the police were following her, and crafted elaborate conspiracy theories. She couldn’t sleep in the dark, a problem she solved by staying up all night. For years she was aggressive and could teeter on the edge of violence, once threatening Loudon with a knife when Loudon was a child. She couldn’t keep a job or stay on one topic of conversation for longer than a few moments. For Catherine, these symptoms were a constant. There was no life outside them.

After Catherine’s death, Loudon is left to fill in the gaps. To do so, she begins the eerie process of retracing Catherine’s steps. She visits Catherine’s apartment in Bristol. She interviews the super, the doctor, the local grocer, and various members of the clergy who knew her sister; each one serves as a link to the next person down the line who might have a detail to add to the portrait. Loudon finds that Catherine, who had shown some brilliance as an artist when she was young, had continued to paint, though the work had diminished in quality and inventiveness. There was a circuit of shops and churches she liked to visit; some days she was talkative, other days she’d sit or stand in silence for hours.

She had no romantic entanglements. Uncomfortable as a woman, Catherine reinvented herself as Dr. Steve Stevenz — Stevie for short — dressing in men’s clothing and modifying her walk so it resembled a masculine gait. She didn’t seek treatment for her breast cancer for a year after she discovered a lump because she was embarrassed to be afflicted with a disease associated with women.

The picture that emerges is of someone who lived quietly, according to a well-defined routine. We never learn whether she did so willfully, an acknowledgment of her own limitations, or because she simply could not function any other way. Most of the details that Loudon shares come through the form of other people’s testimony, and much of that information seems watered down or restrained. Some are impressions at best. The only scene that hints at the helter-skelter of Catherine’s mind in her later life takes place in her apartment. “All of Catherine’s problems were contained in that flat,” their mother warns Loudon. Inside, Loudon finds “the jagged top layer of a derangement so profound that I doubt I will ever see its like again.”

Shuffled in among the scraps of food and other trash on the floor are empty packets of Kodak 35mm film, a Rubik’s cube, stray shoes, lampshades, pill bottles, broken clocks, knit scarves in the colors of Catherine’s favorite football team, her paintings of Tibetan monks, a Madonna figurine. The words “Lord, this cell is cold” are scrawled on the wall; Loudon sees them and sobs. The sole item of furniture is a bed, two mattresses piled one atop the other in the corner of the living room. The proper bedroom is in use as a closet, with clothes piled so high on the floor that Loudon can barely open the door to enter the room. External surroundings can’t provide a perfect reflection of inner life, but this is the closest Loudon comes to evoking the illness as Catherine lived it.

If only the whole book were so vivid. Loudon is a wonderful writer, open and thoughtful. She frequently raises the larger question of what sanity is, and her insights are rendered with sparkling precision. But she stiffs us on what we might think of as primary source material, like Catherine’s notebooks, which Loudon deems too chaotic and “hellish” to share. Far worse, she leaves out details derived from a paper trail of letters from doctors, social workers, bank and prison officials, sent to the Loudons over the years. Excluded, too, are letters between Catherine and her parents. (The spellbinding excerpt of her father’s journal that Loudon does include, from his 1973 trip to India to fetch Catherine after her breakdown, suggests that his letters would have been a fascinating addition.) We know these documents exist because, toward the end of the book, Loudon reads them, paraphrasing their contents in a few sketchy lines: “There were official letters, loving letters, pleading letters, begging letters … There were letters written from locations which themselves served to illustrate the nomadic tumult of Catherine’s early twenties: letters written from comfortable homes and gardens but also from bedsits, hospitals, beach huts, mountain cabins, hippy communes, and prisons.” Yet Loudon omits them — all of them. When you’ve followed her through a ream of interviews, it’s frustrating to come so close to Catherine, only to have the information withheld at the last minute. It’s hard to think of a single way in which their inclusion wouldn’t have made the story deeper and more complex.

So why does Loudon keep the letters to herself? Is it propriety? Is she protecting Catherine, or the family, or both? Or is it unreasonable, as a reader, to expect to see it all in memoir, and to be disappointed when we don’t?

The answer is that at bottom, “Relative Stranger” isn’t really about Catherine, and so the letters are, in the end, immaterial. And it’s not about schizophrenia either, which, beyond an information-driven early chapter, Loudon describes chiefly in metaphor — it’s a “terrible sentence,” a place where one is from, a “poisoned filter.” No, it’s about Loudon herself. Memoirists aren’t obligated to tell any story but their own, and the story in question here is about her journey toward understanding the workings of Catherine’s illness. It’s about the experience of mourning someone she loved but barely knew, and about the task of having to ask strangers what her sister was like. (A lowlife at a coffee shop counters, “What kind of sister are you?” Oof –)

It’s also about her quest to prove to herself, and us, that Catherine’s life had value — to challenge the latent assumption that the lives of the mentally ill are somehow of lesser worth. “How terrible for your parents,” one person says upon hearing the news. “But it’s better in a way they know what’s happened to her, than that they die wondering”– as if a child’s early, lonely death ever could be a relief to her parents.

Catherine’s death was actually the opposite of a relief to Loudon — it was the opening of a book, rather than its conclusion. And in a similar inversion, the driving question of “Relative Stranger” comes at the end, not the beginning. “What is a good life, well-lived, and who says so?” Loudon asks. She doesn’t offer an answer. The absence of one suggests that perhaps such categorizations are irrelevant. A life is a life, and Catherine’s was no different.

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Grief that doesn’t heal

A new memoir explores one father's experience coming to grips with his daughter's death

By Heller McAlpin, Barnes & Noble Review

Topics:Memoirs, Books, Nonfiction

This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

When Roger Rosenblatt’s 38-year-old daughter, Amy, a pediatrician, died unexpectedly of an undetected heart condition in 2007, he and his wife of nearly 50 years moved from their home in Quogue, on the southern shore of Long Island, down to their daughter’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, to help their son-in-law, a hand surgeon, take care of their three small grandchildren, then ages six, five and one. In his beautiful memoir “Making Toast,” Rosenblatt chronicled how pulling together to create a hectic, multigenerational household saved them all. Despite its heart-rending subject matter, “Making Toast” was ultimately a hopeful, heartwarming book.

“Kayak Morning,” which deals with the tenaciousness of grief, is a more melancholy read, less cathartic and reassuring. It is a bereaved father’s meditation on unacceptable loss. What it has going for it is searing honesty, exquisitely expressed. Discussing his earlier volume, Rosenblatt writes, “In it, I tried to suggest that the best one can do in a situation such as ours is to get on with it. I believe that still. What I failed to calculate is the pain that increases even as one gets on with it.” A therapist friend tells him, “Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at once. But it is your guest for a lifetime.” The challenge, Rosenblatt comes to understand, is to transform grief into a positive force.

Always a loner, Rosenblatt takes up kayaking two and a half years after Amy’s death as an escape from his hectic household — which gathers in Quogue during the summer. Affording rare moments of solitude, his time on the water is brooding time away from the brood. “Kayak Morning” opens just past dawn on June 27, 2010, a few months after the publication of “Making Toast.” While the rest of his family — including his wife, two grown sons, and six grandchildren — sleep, Rosenblatt slides his olive-green kayak into the water and paddles out to Penniman’s Creek. Over the next seven hours (and 145 pages), he explores both his own life and that of the half-mile-long creek, letting his thoughts and boat meander, “bob[bing] along in solitary confinement” as the “tides rummage with the pebbles.”

Rosenblatt’s observations about his palindromic vessel, literature, and his own painful feelings are sometimes somber but always rich. He comments, “You can’t always make your way in the world by moving up. Or down, for that matter. Boats move laterally on water, which levels everything. It is one of the two great levelers.” Rosenblatt is practiced enough to know that his statement is far more powerful without spelling out the second leveler.

As Rosenblatt’s reflections make clear, it wasn’t as if he lived a life sheltered from painful realities before Amy’s death. The author of 15 books, including “Children of War,” Rosenblatt recollects grim assignments reporting on Cambodian girls in Thai refugee camps, patients in a Beirut mental hospital, and children of Hutus and surviving Tutsis staring out windows in a U.N. camp in Tanzania. He recalls the many U.S. presidents he has met, including an affable Ronald Reagan, about whom he wrote the “Man of the Year” story for Time magazine.

Amid his anger at God and disgust with his own weakness and self-absorption, his thoughts frequently turn to literature, including works about fathers and daughters (“King Lear,” “Emma,” “Washington Square”) and “crazy old men in boats: Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Hemingway’s Old Man, Captains Ahab, Nemo, McWhirr, Wolf Larsen, Queeg, Bligh.” Commenting that “Only literary jerks like me think of ‘Moby-Dick’ in Starbucks,” he adds, “Seeing the world through a book darkly. I’m not sure it’s good for you.”

In other words, all that intellectualizing and introspection may not be as effective a path to happiness as just doing what you have to do: “Too much is made of the value of plumbing the depths. The nice thing about kayaking is that you ride the surface, which is akin to dealing with the task at hand.” Still, for certain people — Rosenblatt among them — plumbing the depths is inescapable. And writing, which, like kayaking, requires “precision and restraint,” is what keeps him afloat, even if it is not as effective at making “sorrow endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible” as he would wish.

Drifting on the water, he realizes that “Art does not make up a life. Experience does not make up a life. And death does not make up a life either.” What does, then? Love. “Kayak Morning,” with this hopeful epiphany, leaves us looking forward to Rosenblatt’s next update on how he and his extended family are getting on with the business of making “somewhere out of nowhere,” triumphing over the devastations of abiding grief through enduring love.

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The death of the celebrity memoir

We can thank Snooki for something: Finally, this annoying publishing trend looks like it is fizzling out

By Laura Miller

(Credit: sgame via Shutterstock)

Topics:Books, Celebrity, Publishing, Michael Korda, Memoirs

In a recent essay for the Daily Beast, Michael Korda, the storied former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, warned the public to stay away from celebrity memoirs, decrying the majority of these books as “dull, homogenized, bland and sanitized.” He ought to know, for as he goes on to explain, he spent much of his professional life trying to persuade movie stars to write their autobiographies. (One of the ironies here is that Korda, while a celebrity only in the book world — which means not much of a celebrity at all — is famous for writing divertingly about almost any topic, including himself. This piece is no exception.)

A growing awareness of this truth might explain why sales of celebrity memoirs have fallen off of late. According to the Guardian newspaper in Britain, a whole raft of celebrity-authored books tanked in the U.K. last year. In the U.S., as well, there have been several notable failures, particularly by cast members from the reality TV show “Jersey Shore.” Could the public finally be wising up?

Of course, the cause might just be the low caliber of the celebrities in question. I didn’t recognize any of the names the Guardian held up as fizzling memoirists — except for Alan Partridge, who isn’t even a real person. “I, Partridge” was in fact written by the actor-writer-director Steve Coogan, who created the character of Partridge for a television series parodying B-list chat-show hosts and other effluvia of the media world. His book is a parody of celebrity memoirs, and reportedly the only “significant” title in a genre whose sales have dropped 60 percent in the past year.

However, I suspect it’s mostly just wishful thinking that has some observers pegging the celebrity memoir as a fading trend. It’s hard for me to say for sure, though, because I seem to have a much lower than average interest in the people who write them. To be honest, apart from a couple of episodes of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” back when it first came out, I’ve never watched a reality TV show. (My feeling is that if I’m going to be entertained, I’ll go to professionals.) So I still don’t really know who Snooki is, and when I asked friends and acquaintances to fill me in around the time her book came out, they all said. “You’re lucky. You’re much better off not knowing.”

Most celebrities are actors of some kind, and my (somewhat limited) experience writing movie and television journalism has led me to conclude that actors are some of the least interesting people in the arts. That doesn’t mean I’m not regularly awestruck by the work they create; I just really don’t want to listen to them talk about it. Or about their personal lives. And I certainly don’t want to read about either one. The more famous and rich an actor is, the more controlled, frictionless and therefore insipid his or her life is likely to be. As Korda writes, “Years of standing in the limelight portraying other people for large amounts of money does not usually lead to a high degree of self-examination, let alone self-criticism.”

I’m not talking about creative visionaries like Patti Smith or innovators like Tina Fey, real writers whose ability to reflect thoughtfully on their own work and lives is unquestioned. Their books don’t exist for the sole reason that the people who wrote them are famous and know some other famous people; often, they aren’t even thought of as celebrity memoirs in the first place. The true celebrity memoir is “written” (that is, ghostwritten for) what used to be called “entertainment personalities,” namely, movie and television stars.

A movie star, like a politician, has usually spent much time, effort and money to construct a public persona, and, as Korda explains, such people are “seldom likely to want to deface their images, or to puncture the balloon of their egos merely to sell books.” (The money to be made on even a successful book is dwarfed by the fees for starring in Hollywood movies.) For this reason, most famous actors’ memoirs are bland and cautious, but even if they were willing to “tell the truth” — the thing, according to Korda, that every book publisher hopes for — that truth is unlikely to be worth the price of a hardcover book.

The example he uses is the film actor Glenn Ford, whose memoir the agent, Swifty Lazar (a more entertaining character than any actor Korda mentions), once tried to peddle. Ford had co-starred and been infatuated with Rita Hayworth (the Angelina Jolie of her time). But they’d never slept together, which put him in a fairly similar position to every other guy in America except Orson Welles. Who cares? And if Ford had slept with Hayworth? Is that really enough to justify the other 250 pages of a no-doubt tedious book chronicling Ford’s childhood in Canada and early theater work in Santa Monica? Sort of a moot point, that, since Ford clammed up at the very mention of the Hayworth non-affair.

Perhaps reality-TV stars have arisen to fill the candidness deficit created by people who are famous for some good reason. That movie star or top athlete is never going to ‘fess up about his or her private quarrels and most humiliating intimate or professional moments; they don’t have to. But reality-TV stars exist for the sole purpose of having embarrassing experiences in the public eye. They aren’t just willing to talk about this stuff: it’s their job. They’ve got nothing else to talk about.

Again, I’m the opposite of an expert in this department, but I do have a certain perspective to offer. Because I don’t watch reality TV, my impression of it is constructed entirely from conversations with people who do watch it. With the exception of a handful of contest shows like “Project Runway,” I’ve never heard anyone speak of the characters in reality TV shows without contempt. Often they will go on and on about how awful these people are. Whatever lofty anthropological reasons some of them may offer for watching the shows, from my perspective it seems that their chief appeal lies in giving viewers someone to look down on.

But while Americans may take great pleasure in collectively groaning over whatever risible antics Snooki gets up to for a half-hour every week, it’s no surprise that this would not translate into sales of her book. Surely people buy celebrity books not because they’re anticipating a satisfying literary experience, but rather to own a tangible piece of that individual’s stardom. (Also: Autograph tours are an obligatory element in the publication of any celebrity-authored title, so they get a chance to meet their idol face-to-face.) It’s another way of expressing one’s fandom. If the whole point of Snooki is hating on her, why would anyone want to purchase a bookful of that?

Celebrity memoirs make some commenters very, very angry. Although the genre has been around (in one version or another) for at least a century, the latest iteration is often held up as Exhibit A in arguments for the disgraceful state of book publishing. I can’t get too worked up about this. It makes as much sense as ranting about the abundance and popularity of books on any topics that don’t interest me personally (i.e., golf — lotta golf books out there).

Besides, the indignation seems misdirected. Publishers publish these titles because (until recently, at least), they do sell. For all the hopeful talk of declining enthusiasm for the genre, it’s worth noting that “Kardashian Konfidential” has sold well over 100,000 copies. Paris Hilton’s “Confessions of an Heiress,” published in 2004, has sold over 1 million worldwide.

Doesn’t the problem here lie instead with the buyers of such books? (Seriously: Since I have such a hard time imagining why anyone would do so, if you have bought one of these celebrity memoirs, would you be so generous as to explain your motives in the comments thread?) Every time someone told me I was fortunate in not knowing who Snooki or Kim Kardashian are, I couldn’t help wondering why they chose to know so much about her themselves. Perhaps they secretly enjoy their own theatrical disgust with the state of American culture and society.

If we really wanted these annoying figures to go away, the solution is pretty simple: Stop paying attention to them. I’m here to testify that this is very easy to do. You, too, can know next to nothing about the Situation or Tila Tequila (whoever they are!), if they really bother you that much. A blank expression will pass over your face when their names are mentioned in conversation, and when you see placards announcing their forthcoming appearances at chain bookstores, you’ll frown vaguely, shrug and keep walking toward the shelves with the real books.

Further reading

Michael Korda on the dullness of Hollywood memoirs

The Guardian on flagging sales of celebrity memoirs

The Hollywood Reporter on the failure of Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s “A Shore Thing.”

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller

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Inside the “Boston Miracle”

The man behind Operation Ceasefire chronicles his decades-long project to reduce inner-city crime

By Barbara Spindel, Barnes & Noble Review

Topics:Memoirs, Nonfiction, Crime

This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

In the mid-1990s, David M. Kennedy spearheaded Operation Ceasefire, a series of interventions aimed at bringing down the high youth homicide rate in Boston. The project worked so well that it became widely known by another name: the Boston Miracle. In his new book, Kennedy, now a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College, writes, “I always hated that name, it wasn’t a miracle, it was hard damned work.”

“Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America” is Kennedy’s passionate account of that work, which has seen striking results not just in the roughest sections of Boston but in many of the bleakest neighborhoods of the United States. While his goals were lofty — healing toxic relationships between the police and blighted communities, rewriting the conventional wisdom on gangs, drugs and violent crime — Kennedy proposed solutions so simple that cops often laughed him out of the room.

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A journalist’s take on his absentee dad

Newsweek's first black editor explores his relationship with his father in a new memoir

By Jessica Ferri, Barnes & Noble Review

Topics:Memoirs, Nonfiction

This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

Mark Whitaker, the first black editor of Newsweek and current managing editor of CNN Worldwide, explains that it was the memoir of another prominent biracial man, “Dreams of My Father” by Barack Obama, that inspired him to write his own father’s story in “My Long Trip Home.” He goes on to clarify that his memoir will be very different because, unlike President Obama, he knew his father “for half a century, for better or, as was so often the case, for worse.”

The comparison between the two men is apt. Like Obama’s, Whitaker’s heritage is complicated and fascinating. His mother was born to white French-Protestant missionaries who sent her, at age fourteen, and her five younger sisters to live in the United States when the Nazis invaded France. Whitaker’s father, C. S. Whitaker, or Syl (as he preferred), grew up in Pennsylvania, the son of black parents who ran a successful funeral parlor business. The two met at Swarthmore, where his mother taught French and his father was a student. After getting to know each other, they realized they shared a Quaker faith. And yet, despite their ability to overcome massive roadblocks as an interracial couple, the marriage failed after six years, and Mark and his brother Paul were estranged from their father as he moved away and grew increasingly troubled.

Though the absentee father is unfortunately a familiar theme for memoirists, Whitaker’s approach to his story is unusual. As a journalist, he has been trained to remain unbiased — and though he has the right to editorialize on his father’s actions, Whitaker never chooses sides. While he recalls his mother being distraught over his father’s refusal to pay child support, his feelings about his father’s behavior manifest in other ways — he turns to food for comfort and then battles anorexia as a teenager. He stops drinking for fear of succumbing to alcoholism, as his father did. In preparation for his own marriage, he asks his father why his parents divorced. When his father responds that his mother refused to wear lingerie, and “after that … it was over,” Whitaker expresses disgust but offers a very evenhanded interpretation of the scene: “I was startled at how intent he was on blaming my mother, but I was also flattered that he was being so candid with me. And I felt relieved.”

The second half of the memoir shifts abruptly from personal stories to Whitaker’s professional life at Newsweek and his subsequent rise to the top of the magazine. His experience handling the major news stories of the last twenty years (including a funny anecdote about Henry Kissinger pulling over in Manhattan for soft-serve ice cream) gives the reader an insider’s perspective on the New York news world. That said, the transition from personal to professional is jarring, and one feels that the time could have been spent on other questions. For instance, it’s disappointing that Whitaker’s mother remains a shadowy figure throughout the book. She is, after all, the person who raised him. Intriguingly, “My Long Trip Home” shares this with President Obama’s book as well — in seeking closure with their fathers, the authors neglect their mothers.

Ultimately, Whitaker emphasizes the importance of forgiveness, but not before venting his resentment towards his father: “It wasn’t just love for my wife and children that made me so driven to be a good husband and father. It was also an elaborate form of revenge. I was getting back at him by proving that I could succeed in all the ways he had failed, and that I could do it without his help.” He eventually reneges on this anger, remembering what his mother’s uncle warned her before her marriage: “Angry men don’t make good husbands.” Indeed they don’t — but Whitaker’s ability to move forward shows that anger can be transformed into sheer determination and, ultimately, success and understanding.

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Joan Didion’s most beautiful book yet

Her new memoir is harsh, self-questioning exploration of her life before and after her daughter's death

By Maud Newton, Barnes & Noble Review

Topics:Memoirs, Books

This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

In 2003′s “Where I Was From,” Joan Didion tells of a long wagon journey on which her great-great-grandmother buried a child, gave birth to another, contracted mountain fever twice, and sewed a quilt, “a blinding and pointless compaction of stitches,” that she must have finished en route, “somewhere in the wilderness of her own grief and illness, and just kept on stitching.” Throughout the book, Didion ruminates on her female forebears, women “pragmatic and in their deepest instincts clinically radical, given to breaking clean with everyone and everything they knew,” even their own dead babies.

It was Didion’s adopted daughter, Quintana, at age 5 or 6, who first made all this heredity start to seem remote. And if the author harbored any lingering doubt about whether she shared her ancestors’ breaking-clean tendencies, the shattering effect of Quintana’s death in 2005, at age 39, must have swept it away. In her new memoir, “Blue Nights,” about life before and after the loss of her daughter, Didion writes, “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.”

This book may be Didion’s harshest, most self-questioning book yet; it’s definitely her most beautiful. Like the stitches on her grandmother’s quilt, it covers the same material again and again, swooping down on its author’s grief with dogged, needle-like precision, from countless angles that don’t lead her anywhere soothing. “What if I fail to love this baby?” Didion worried as she carried the newborn Quintana home from the hospital. By the time of “Blue Nights,” the questions have changed. What if I didn’t love her right, the author interrogates herself. What if I didn’t love her enough? How could Didion “have missed what was so clearly there to be seen” — “the startling depths and shallows of her expressions, the quicksilver changes of mood,” the list of “Mom’s sayings” that Quintana posted on the garage wall: “Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working“? “Was I the problem?” she wonders. “Was I always the problem?”

Didion dwelt in “Where I Was From” on her female forebears’ tendencies “toward slight and major derangements” and “apparently eccentric pronouncements,” traits she’d once seen as biologically endemic. “Blue Nights,” by contrast, fixates on nurture, on the terrible possibility that a mother’s neuroses might be contagious. At the age of 5, Quintana called a state psychiatric facility to “find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy.” Around the same time, she called Twentieth Century Fox “to find out what she needed to do to be a star.” She dreamed of a “Broken Man” who threatened to lock her in the garage, and she wrote a novel “just to show you” that told “why and how Quintana [not just the name of its author but also its protagonist] died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.” Once she was born, Didion admits, “I was never not afraid.” And she all but blames herself for Quintana’s nightmares. “[M]y fear of The Broken Man [was] as unquestioning as her own,” she says.

Throughout these struggles, Quintana’s psychiatric diagnosis remained frustratingly protean. Manic depression became OCD; OCD became something else, something Didion can’t remember now, but something that ultimately gave way to a succession of other conditions before “the least programmatic of her doctors settled on one that actually seemed to apply”: borderline personality disorder, a diagnosis that didn’t lead to a cure, only “a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.” Depressed and anxious, Quintana drank too much. She wished for death as she lay on her sitting room floor: “Let me just be in the ground, she had kept sobbing. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.” She implored Didion not to read Auden’s “Funeral Blues” at her father’s funeral. “Like when someone dies,” she once told her mother, “don’t dwell on it.”

Even as she torments herself with memories of Quintana’s troubles, Didion recognizes that child-rearing standards change. While parents measure their success now by “the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us,” her own World War Two-era childhood emphasized independence over schooling and friends. She roamed the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, eavesdropped on the patients, and put them into stories. “There was a war in progress,” she recalls. “That war did not revolve around or in any way hinge upon the wishes of children. In return for tolerating these … truths, children were allowed to invent their own lives. The notion that they could be left to their own devices — were in fact best left so — went unquestioned.”

In the title essay of her 1979 book “The White Album,” Didion recalls a psychiatric evaluation of her own, conducted in 1968 (two years after she and her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, brought Quintana home from the hospital), that said her Rorschach responses “emphasize[d] her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal.” Rather than admitting to or denying these claims, or trying to trace the source of her (mild) breakdown, Didion jokes that “an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”

In “Blue Nights” Didion brings a compelling and paradoxical blend of skepticism, acceptance, and astringent detachment to bear on these trends in psychology — and how they both reflect and shape our own self-images. As in most of her personal writing, she’s highly attuned to these kinds of recursive absurdities, and I would guess she’s also more than a little bit amused by them. But, like the very funny Flannery O’Connor, she depicts the ridiculous with a poker-face. And, as in O’Connor, the comic element of human existence is always the obverse of something much darker.

Didion acknowledges in interviews that it was a fluke — a flu — that killed Quintana, not mental illness, not alcoholism, not anything she herself did. But as she sees her own health fail, as she tries to “maintain faith (another word for momentum),” follow the doctor’s instructions, and “collect encouraging news,” as she spends whole days in frigid waiting rooms pondering “this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency?,” she sustains herself by “memoriz[ing] her child’s face.” Didion’s implicit subject has always been the storyteller’s conundrum: that in standing far apart enough from life to digest it and to evoke it, the writer forgets how to live in real life. For Didion, to remember Quintana is to tell stories in which she’s not a good enough mother to Quintana, but to stop telling these stories is to run the risk that Quintana “will fade from my touch. Vanish. Pass into nothingness.” We tell ourselves stories in order to live, she once wrote. If Quintana were to disappear, Didion implies, she herself would stop existing.