"[1] Blue Nights is notable for its "nihilistic"[2] attitude towards grief as Didion offers little understanding or explanation of her daughter's death.

Writing for The New York Review of Books, Cathleen Schine said, "'We tell ourselves stories in order to live,' Didion famously wrote in The White Album.

Blue Nights is about what happens when there are no more stories we can tell ourselves, no narrative to guide us and make sense out of the chaos, no order, no meaning, no conclusion to the tale.

Unlike some other memoirs, including Didion's previous work, Blue Nights does not follow a conventional narrative path.

[6] In the early hours of March 3, 1966, Joan and John received a call from that same doctor stating that he had just delivered a baby girl and needed to know whether or not they wanted her.

Brain surgery and two years of post-op recovery were not sufficient; her injury coupled with her multiple illnesses would lead to her death on August 26, 2005.

In a New York Times review, John Banville stated that Didion's style changed after the memoir that focused on the death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking.

After writing the initial drafts, Didion rewrites in order to make that turn from cold journalistic reporting to more emotional reflection.

[11] Similarly, NPR's Lawrence Frascella describes the book as having "an aching desperation...to reach some sort of shattering revelation about mortality.