Was your mourning for Quintana delayed?
Yes, I was on book tour [for The Year of Magical Thinking], then the play--and that was obviously a way of dealing with it, because I lived through it every night in the theater. I was forced to deal with Quintana. But I didn't really deal with her death until much later.
What does it mean to deal with it?
You accept that it happened.
Were you concerned that Blue Nights was too similar to Magical Thinking?
I couldn't think of anything to write that was more on my mind. I thought I was going to deal in a more general way with the entire experience of children: how we raise them, the mistakes we made and didn't make. And then it went in a different direction. It went to one child--mine.
When Quintana was in high school, her English teacher had the kids keep a daily diary. It's fascinating, because she wrote about the books she didn't like. Jane Austen she can't stand. Then I find out that another thing she can't stand at the moment is John and me. But this was a secret. Only her English teacher got to know this.
How was losing a child different from losing a husband?
There's a whole lot more guilt involved. I did not really think I was guilty for John's death--nor was I guilty. John died because he had heart trouble. But with Quintana, I could not avoid thinking there was something I could have done.
As you point out in Blue Nights, most parents feel they didn't do the best job raising their kids.
I didn't take seriously how troubled she was. She was troubled from very early, certainly from the time she was 5 or 6. If you come home and your child tells you that she's called a mental hospital--that should have triggered something other than amusement on my part. The entire adoption thing was a much bigger issue for her than I ever imagined it to be.
What about the other side, for the adopting parent?
The fear is you won't be up to it, it won't take, you won't love them. That fear goes away the minute the baby comes home. But they don't stop feeling abandoned. I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
You wrote that Quintana said she wished she could be in the ground.
Quintana had the thoughts. She didn't take good care of herself. She drank too much. She was depressed. [After she underwent surgery for a brain hemorrhage] we all should have realized that she was not going to recover as fast as she imagined she was.
Blue Nights is full of doubt--about how you were as a mother, how you raised Quintana. If you go back to your early essays, like "Why I Write," the voice is one of certainty.
I'm not certain anymore. It was very hard to write this book because I didn't feel certain about what I was saying, where to go. I could usually fake that kind of certainty.
"On Self-Respect" was an amazing expression of wisdom at a young age.