Joan Didion: Blue Nights

Her depths and shallows, her quicksilver changes.

Of course they were not allowed to remain just that, depths, shallows, quicksilver changes.

Of course they were eventually assigned names, a “diagnosis.” The names kept changing. Manic depression for example became OCD and OCD was short for obsessive-compulsive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder became something else, I could never remember just what but in any case it made no difference because by the time I did remember there would be a new name, a new “diagnosis.” I put the word “diagnosis” in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a “diagnosis” led to a “cure,” or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.

Yet another demonstration of medicine as an imperfect art.

She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself. Alcohol has its own well-known defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested — ask any doctor — that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known. This would seem a fairly straight-forward dynamic, yet, once medicalized — once the depths and shallows and quicksilver changes had been assigned names — it appeared not to be. We went through many diagnoses, many conditions that got called by many names, before the least programmatic among her doctors settled on one that seemed to apply. The name of the condition that seemed to apply was this: “borderline personality disorder.” “Patients with this diagnosis are a complex mixture of strengths and weaknesses that confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist.” So notes a 2001 New England Journal of Medicine review of John G. Gunderson’s Borderline Personality Disorder: A Clinical Guide . “Such patients may seem charming, composed, and psychologically intact one day and collapse into suicidal despair the next.” The review continues: “Impulsivity, affective lability, frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, and identity diffusion are all hallmarks.”

I had seen most of these hallmarks.

I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair.

I had seen her wishing for death as she lay on the floor of her sitting room in Brentwood Park, the sitting room from which she had been able to look into the pink magnolia. Let me just be in the ground , she had kept sobbing. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep .

I had seen the impulsivity.

I had seen the “affective lability,” the “identity diffusion.”

What I had not seen, or what I had in fact seen but had failed to recognize, were the “frantic efforts to avoid abandonment.”

How could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her?

Had she no idea how much we needed her?

I recently read for the first time several fragments of what she had referred to at the time she wrote them as “the novel I’m writing just to show you.” She must have been thirteen or fourteen when this project occurred to her. “Some of the events are based on the truth and the others are fictitious,” she advises the reader at the outset. “The names have not yet been definitively changed.” The protagonist in these fragments, also fourteen and also named Quintana (although sometimes referred to by other names, presumably trials for the definitive changes to come), believes she may be pregnant. She consults, in a plot point that seems specifically crafted to “confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist,” her pediatrician. The pediatrician advises her that she must tell her parents. She does so. Her idea of how her parents would respond seems, like the entire rest of the plot point involving the pregnancy, confused, a fantasy, a manifestation of what might be extreme emotional distress or might be no more than narrative inventiveness: “They said that they would provide the abortion but after that they did not even care about her any more. She could live in their suburbia house in Brentwood, but they didn’t even care what she did any more. That was fine in her book. Her father had a bad temper, but it showed that they cared very much about their only child. Now, they didn’t even care any more. Quintana would lead her life any way she wanted.”

At this point the fragment skids to an abrupt close: “On the next pages you will find out why and how Quintana died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.”

So ended the novel she was writing just to show us.

Show us what?

Show us that she could write a novel?

Show us why and how she would die?

Show us what she believed our reaction would be?

Now, they didn’t even care any more .

No.

She had no idea how much we needed her.

How could we have so misunderstood one another?

Had she chosen to write a novel because we wrote novels? Had it been one more obligation pressed on her? Had she felt it as a fear? Had we?

What follows are notes I made about a figure who at an earlier point had populated her nightmares, a fantast she called The Broken Man and described so often and with such troubling specificity that I was frequently moved to check for him on the terrace outside her second-floor windows. “He has on a blue work shirt, like a repair man,” she repeatedly told me. “Short sleeves. He has his name always on his shirt. On the right-hand side. His name is David, Bill, Steve, one of those common names. I would guess this man is maybe age fifty to fifty-nine. Cap like a Dodger cap, navy blue, GULF on it. Brown belt, navy-blue pants, black really shiny shoes. And he talks to me in a really deep voice: Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage . After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.”

David, Bill, Steve, one of those common names?

Name always on his shirt? On the right-hand side?

Cap like a Dodger cap, navy blue, GULF on it?

After she became five she never ever dreamed about him?

It was when she said “I would guess this man is maybe age fifty to fifty-nine” that I realized my fear of The Broken Man to be as unquestioning as her own.

On this question of fear.

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

The ways in which for example we write novels “just to show” each other.

The ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear.

The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other.

As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all, at least not children per se , at least not children qua children: their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death.

This fear.

Only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children .

Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage .

After I became five I never ever dreamed about him .

Once she was born I was never not afraid.

I was afraid of swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet, The Broken Man himself. I was afraid of rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides, strangers who appeared at the door, unexplained fevers, elevators without operators and empty hotel corridors. The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her. A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away? Would the fear go away for both of us, or would the fear go away only for me?