Well, it's probably blasphemy to say this, and I did give this book the highest possible rating, but some of Didion's stylistic methods: the lists, the questions, the coy mingling of abstract and concrete, were showing here. They felt like tricks rather than fluid means of transcending the personal and reaching the universal. I actually got annoyed with the narrator when she couldn't seem to answer her own interminable questions when the answers seemed obvious to me. Of course, if your mother has chronic migraine, carries a presumptive diagnosis of MS, looks frail, writes about chaos and the meaninglessness of the universe, and your parents take you with them around the world to movie sets and agents' offices, you may well become precocious, feel as if it is your job to take care of them, and develop your own sense that the universe is meaningless and chaotic. Is this really mysterious? You may see the randomness lurking in the choice/adoption fable meant to reassure you that you were fated to be with your adoptive parents. How could you not ask "what if you weren't home when the doctor called to offer me to you," etc., when your mother asks these sorts of questions in her writing all the time? How can Didion not see how much Quintana probably wanted to be a writer like Mom and Dad?
Didion approaches and then darts away from deeper understanding of her daughter's and her own psychology. Some of the montage/collage -- the movement from contemplating her daughter's psychology to her own physical problems of aging felt narcissistic. Can she only think about her daughter empathetically for so long before she has to shift focus to herself? I understand that the larger themes are mortality and the unwillingness to acknowledge the passage of time, etc., etc., but there were still so many moments when I wanted to pin the narrator down to staying in the moment with her daughter before getting back to herself.

Didion also throws around psychiatric diagnoses applied at various times to Quintana as if they explain her but it feels cruel to apply a diagnosis so often used to discredit intense women, and so often lacking in scientific validity -- borderline personality disorder -- to describe her daughter. It doesn't explain at this point, it only discredits. I haven't yet quite gotten to the end of the book but it's still not clear to me what the connection is between these psychiatric diagnoses and her daughter's final physical illness. Maybe Didion is relying on the reader to connect some of these dots, but for some reason this book felt more coy and evasive than her other works. Are we being asked to forgive her? Tell her that whatever happened with her daughter isn't her fault? Or condemn and forgive her at the same time? Is the subject matter still too fraught, too painful, the relationship too unresolved? Am I projecting here my own feelings about my mother and her blindnesses to me? I feel as if I'm being too hard on Didion -- What could be more horrible than losing your husband and your daughter within a few months of one another, in the midst of losing your own physical and cognitive bearings? Didion is brave to even broach these subjects, and even when she's not at the top of her game, she's better than virtually everyone else writing memoir. I relished every word of this book even as I sometimes wanted to shake the narrator.