Matthew Specktor deconstructs Joan Didion’s new memoir, Blue Nights, over at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Specktor takes a hard look on Didion’s relationship to privilege:

Before it is any of these things, privilege is also a social position, and if Didion is wholly within bounds, and then some, to dismiss anyone who would cudgel her with the stylish particulars of her own life, that doesn’t automatically overturn the fact of Blue Nights’ still conspicuous glamour, its rented houses in Barbados, its recounting of Quintana’s first taste of caviar, of nights at the Dorchester, the St. Regis, and the Plaza Athénée.

And yet. Like James Salter’s similarly reticent, similarly glamorous and remarkable Burning the Days (similar in other ways too: like Didion, Salter lost a young adult daughter, which fact is only mentioned in passing in his book), Blue Nights turns this aristocratic aspect to account. “It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoleon Bonaparte said that,” Didion writes. “What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripides said that.” We’re on exalted ground here, and Didion knows it. Napoleon Bonaparte wasn’t exactly underprivileged himself, and the very core of Blue Nights seems to reside in the fact that we all believe ourselves privileged — privileged never to die, perhaps, or privileged not to suffer the eviscerating losses the author of this book has suffered.

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