Blue Nights

Throughout, Crosley cites Joan Didion, whose two personal books on grief, the year of magical thinking and blue nights, she obviously sees as a touchstone for her own.

I mean, I, I took a lot of that from Blue Knights. Like, you get the sense that she is a John Didion is reckoning for the first time having lost her daughter with what it must have actually been like to be her daughter, like to actually be that person.

And you get the sense that she was really wrestling with that after having lost her daughter.

And I think that that, that's part of her, you know, her guilt and anxiety is, is that she, she didn't realize she wasn't prepared. And she, when he was saying, I can't deal with it, she didn't, she thought he was just, you know, trying to bail instead of saying I'm literally, literally cannot deal with this.

Or was she really struggling in ways that I was blind to and should have been more compassionate and understanding? And how do they contribute to the problems that she had later in life?

And someone I've read all her stuff, and there's incredible stoke themes in blue nights, a year of magical thinking.

And then the last one, the most beautiful, and haunting, which is a sort of memento mori exercise, she talks about this in blue nights, she's at the church watching her daughter get married.

Joan Didion writes hauntingly in her beautiful book Blue Nights which you should absolutely read.

Have you read Blue Nights by Joan Didion?

so this is her table is it in the bookshop i'm sorry this is this is her table like this is the table her family would have like dinner and she there's this paragraph in the book where she's at her daughter's wedding this is like July 2003 and she's walking on the street she says I wonder if someone walking down Amsterdam Avenue saw the mother of the bride and thought before this year is out her husband will be dead at their table and her daughter will be in a medically induced coma and like leave this world like just a few months later and so you think these things happen to other people and she she talked about this her her she was sitting in her kitchen with her husband and he just keeled over and died and uh I believe a heart attack no a brain in yourism and she rushed to the to the fridge where she had like the number for emergency service like for the hospital and she she said I remember writing that number down and putting it on the fridge in case somebody in the building needed it right like you never think it's gonna happen to you you think these are things that happen to other people and so there's this kind of arrogance or entitlement this idea that we're the exception to the rule that won't happen to us and this is why we put stuff off this is why we you know take people or things for granted and then it does happen and it's not just loss it's like hey I have a platform I get to do this you know dream job but also like it can be taken from you you can fuck it up the rules of the game can change you can be the victim of an injustice like you don't know how long you get to do it so to not enjoy it while you do it and we're worse to procrastinate or to defer is you know a rejection of the gift that is the present moment.