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Kind ofblue 忧郁的本质 Blue Nights. By Joan Didion. 《忧郁的夜》，琼迪丹著。 Few memoirs are worth reading. When they are nottawdry opportunities to air grievances, settlescores or rationalise errors, they tend to be tales ofadversity with a triumphant twist. This is whatmakes Joan Didion unique. Her non-fiction hasalways considered grand matters from a personal perspective, without making herself thecentre of the story. Even when she writes about the hard drama of her own life, such as thesudden death of her husband followed by the death of her only daughter, her stories manageto be larger than her own grief. 鲜有回忆录有看头。作者们如果没法发牢骚、翻旧账、找借口，就是自吹自擂的往脸上贴金。琼迪丹与众不同之处正在于此。她的纪实类文学作品常常是从个人视角出发，思考重大事件，而不是把自己作为故事的中心。即使是写到诸如独生女儿死去之后丈夫也突然去世这样自己生命中艰难时刻，她对故事的经营也远远超过了自己的悲伤。 This is how a memoir like The Year of Magical Thinking became a bestseller. Inwriting about the year that followed the fatal heart attack of John Gregory Dunne, herhusband of nearly 40 years, Ms Didion used her experience to reflect on the fundamentalabsurdity of death. She movingly considered the way time makes the ordinary gifts of lifeextraordinary. The unmentioned horror of the bookan event that took place after she hadfinished writing but before it was publishedwas that her daughter Quintana Roo was dead,too, undone by a series of health problems that ended with acute pancreatitis at the age of39. | 
