I didn’t love Blue Nights immediately upon reading it.

This may come as a complete and total surprise to anyone who has listened to me talk ever. I have been stupid in love with Joan Didion’s writing since I was seventeen and first read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” When we read said essay last month in the class I teach, I declared it Happy Joan Didion Day and told my students they would never again experience such a good day.

Let’s put it this way: while my tattoos and my cat are all out of Virginia Woolf books, I did, in fact, dress in homage to “On Keeping a Notebook” for both my first and last class as an MFA student because I have also loved that essay since I was seventeen and wearing the plaid [cotton] dress seemed in keeping with the general neuroses related to both.

What I don’t think I’ve ever talked about is how I read.

I am a terrible first reader.

To say that I read everything the Internet had to say about Blue Nights in the weeks leading up to the book’s release would not be overstatement. And to know that I’ve read everything the Internet had to say about Blue Nights in the weeks leading up to the book’s release means that I read the same quotable passages and the same ponderings on the major themes and the same doubts about the book’s insularity.

And, in actually reading Blue Nights, in one day, into the hours far past my bedtime, I know that the book’s been rushed. By them, by me. Because how do you not wildly consume Didion (especially if you’ve got a review deadline)?

In “A Veil of Words,” Jeanette Winterson writes of people’s difficulties with Woolf’s novel The Waves. She says, “The pace of Woolf’s writing is carefully measured. In The Waves the pace is slow. This is not a defect. Nobody would expect to play a piece of music at twice the speed of the score and be able to enjoy it. Yet, in literature this is happening all the time.” (Her advice on how to go about reading The Waves is invaluable and could ultimately change your mind about the book if you were so inclined to hate it by page two and would not like to try again.)

I am a terrible first reader because I’m a rushed first reader. I hate not understanding my boundaries. I don’t like not knowing what lies ahead, how the book or story or movie takes its rough shape. I don’t know how to make my thoughts happen if I don’t know what all of my thoughts are supposed to be. Especially with a book as hyped as Blue Nights, a first reading is not much more than a semi-subconscious attempt to find all of those aforementioned quotable passages, ponderings, and doubts. It’s not unlike seeing a movie in the theater with the trailer fresh in your mind. Where does that fit in? And that?

It’s a horrible, non-contextualized mess.

The blue nights to which Didion weaves her thoughts are among my most anxiety-ridden. I spend them thinking, Get it over with. Go on, be night already. (That I don’t do well with lingering transitions would be an understatement times ten.) That same rushed resentment I feel during those evenings is the same feeling that always accompanies a first reading, especially for a book with any sort of poetic leanings whatsoever.

Like The Waves, Blue Nights (and, before it, The Year of Magical Thinking) are books of pacing. There’s no real plot, not one we don’t already know from articles and interviews and living in a literary world. They’re all books of repeated images and phrases that mean little if not savored in time with the author’s intentions. They’re all books that benefit from multiple readings because their images and phrases become symphonic in their vast interconnectivity and there’s just no way for [me] to fully live that in fewer than a half dozen readings. Because, the first time, I read thinking, Go on, be night already.

But, in the first read, there are pings. There are, of course, the quotable passages (that will need immense distance in both time and space to become as meaningful as they ought to be, but over-use has already made them as itchy as a Top 40 song). But there are the other, more personal moments. The sentence I underline for myself (the sentence I underline for myself being the very first reason I don’t often lend my books to people). There are movements appreciable mostly only to writers (those, too, underlined, although with less apprehension of the passing glance).

Though it’s been noted that Blue Nights is a veritable who’s who of a generation of a certain brand of celebrity, it’s also, especially when paired with The Year of Magical Thinking, a veritable Easter egg hunt of Didion’s previous work. I could very gladly go through both books and for so many of the anecdotes write in the margin the corresponding essay from Didion’s oeuvre. And it’s because of those things, the pings and the eggs, that I know I will someday love Blue Nights with the same boundless enthusiasm that arises every time I see Joan Didion in print.