Blue Night by Joan Didion

This is a raw, untidy, ragged book. Well, grief is all of those things. On the other hand, Didion wrote about the death of her husband in an iconic memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking, which apart from being raw was none of them. So she knows how it can be done.  That book was about the horribly sudden death of her husband, about shock and pain and then the confusion of bereavement and loss. But it was also a vivid portrait of the man himself.

‘One never knows when the blow may fall’, yet people have been surprisingly surprised that it fell again so quickly on Didion, when her adopted daughter Quintana, also died, a year later. But blows rain down relentlessly, not to say unfairly, on some individuals. Such as Job. Such as my blithely happy friend who then lost her teenage middle son, husband, and teenage younger son all very suddenly, within two years.