How long does it take to read Blue Nights?
Blue Nights by Joan Didion takes about 3 hours 27 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 27 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2011. 188 pages, about 51,700 words.
7 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 45 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 27 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 9 minutes |
The page count is the median across 12 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In this memoir, the author shares her observations about her daughter as well as her own thoughts and fears about having children and growing old, in a personal account that discusses her daughter's wedding and her feelings of failure as a parent. It opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana's wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana's childhood, in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion asks the candid questions any parent might about how she feels she failed either because cues were missed or perhaps displaced. Seamlessly woven in are incidents Didion sees as underscoring her own age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept.
Subjects: American Novelists, Biography, American Women novelists, Mothers and daughters, Authors, biography, Grief
