If You Read One Book This Month: Blue Nights by Joan Didion

“If You Read One Book This Month” is my (you guessed it!) *monthly* write-up on one book, old or new, that I can’t stop thinking about.

I’ve been reading Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s book about losing her daughter Quintana Roo, as I write my own memoir about the narratives we tell our children (and ourselves) about their origin stories. In Joan’s case, she believed that the story she and her husband John told Quintana about choosing her, the adoption narrative they were told would help Quintana feel safe in knowing that she was wanted and loved, turned out to make Quintana feel anything but. Instead, Quintana brimmed with anxiety. 

“What if you hadn’t been home?” when the doctor called saying he had a baby, Quintana wondered. “What if you couldn’t meet him at the hospital?” “What if there’d been an accident on the freeway, what would happen to me then?”

Joan’s story wasn’t enough to quell Quintana's anxiety. The story wasn’t enough to take away Quintana’s pain. 

Instead, her writing style becomes a form of obsession. She excavates the past through her questions, digging deeper and deeper until she hits the rocky foundation below. She records every detail. She pokes at her vulnerabilities. 

“I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) success in the world: the Stanford degree, the Harvard MBA, the summer with the white-shoe law firm. Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies.” - Joan Didion

Will my story be enough for my daughter? Or will she always wonder? Will my daughter have her own list of “what ifs?” What if your frozen eggs had worked? What if you never met my dad? What if you stayed married to that other man? What if the lab tech chose another embryo? 

Quintana’s question “what if?” was a fair one. My daughter’s questions will be fair too. As I write in my book, “If any one thing was different, you wouldn’t exist. Or you’d be a completely different person. The flap of a butterfly’s wings changes the trajectory of the entire world. And so it is when a baby is conceived, deep inside a woman’s body or in a lab under a technician’s microscope.”

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Getting A Book Deal (four weeks)

This four-week crash course in how to get a book deal will give you all the insider tips no one tells you from how to write a query letter that will get you noticed by an agent to how to decide whether to go with an indie or Big 5 publisher (or to self-publish) to how write an elevator pitch that distills your book idea into a digestible concept that sells. We will also have an agent attend our last class to talk about what she is looking for in 2024, the publishing landscape, and to give you a chance to test out your book idea to get feedback from an industry insider.

Outlining Class (one day)

Your outline serves as the skeleton of your book. Without it, there is no roadmap, and nothing to turn to when you hit inevitable roadblocks. This two hour class will provide you with the template you need to take your story to the next level by providing you with actionable instruction on what to include in your outline and why.

How to Write Your Modern Love Essay from someone who wrote her own (one day)

No happy endings here. In honor of Valentine’s Day I am offering a course on how to spin all kinds of love stories (platonic, parental, romantic, etc…) into a piece that fits the Modern Love mold.

I also have a number of other four-six week workshops to choose from in 2024 if you are looking for a bigger commitment.