充滿奇想的一年
地道英文
瓊·狄迪恩（Joan Didion，1934—），美國女作家，個性獨立，在美國當代文學中地位顯赫，以小說、雜文及劇本寫作見長，雜文與小說多次獲獎，由其擔任編劇的電影還獲得了戛納電影獎、奧斯卡獎、金球獎和格萊美獎等獎項。
狄迪恩一直過著令人羨慕的生活：事業有成、家庭美滿，幸福得幾乎忘記了人生還有陰陽相隔、生離死別。2003年，上天開玩笑似地一下子將種種不幸降臨到她頭上——女兒突然患病昏迷，而丈夫也毫無預兆地離世。雙重打擊之下，狄迪恩差點精神崩潰，但她卻沒有號啕大哭，也沒有失魂落魄，而是平靜地把極度的悲痛壓在心底。幾個星期，乃至幾個月間，她哀悼，她思索，心中原有的關於死亡、疾病、運氣、婚姻和悲傷的理解統統動搖。在陷入長達一年多的哀慟與奇想後，她拿起筆寫出此書，把與丈夫四十年共同生活的片斷回憶，以及許多關於生命的困惑與思考如鏡頭般地記錄了下來。
回憶，是因為延綿不盡的思念；叨念，是因為一顆因摯愛而破碎的心。
本書獲2005年美國國家圖書獎。
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file （“Notes on changes.doc”） reads “May 20， 2004， 11：11 p.m.，” but that would have been a case of my opening the file and 1）reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words， in January 2004， a day or two or three after the fact.
For a long time I wrote nothing else.
Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.
At some point， in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened， I considered adding those words， “the ordinary instant.”I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word “ordinary，” because there would be no forgetting it： the word never left my mind. It was， in fact， the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened， absorbing it， incorporating it， getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this： 2）confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred， the clear blue sky from which the plane fell， the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames， the swings where the children were playing as usual when the 3）rattlesnake struck from the ivy. “He was on his way home from work— happy， successful， healthy — and then， gone，” I read in the account of a 4）psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who had been living in 5）Honolulu on the morning of December 7， 1941； without exception， these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an “ordinary Sunday morning”it had been. “It was just an ordinary beautiful September day，” people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently 6）premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note：“Tuesday， September 11， 2001， dawned 7）temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.”
“And then — gone.” In the midst of life we are in death， 8）Episcopalians say at the graveside. Later， I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks， all those friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates on the dining room table for however many people were around at lunch or dinner time， all those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher and filled our（I could not yet think my） otherwise empty house， even after I had gone into the bedroom （our bedroom， the one in which there still lay on a sofa a faded terrycloth XL robe bought in the 1970s at 9）Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills）and shut the door. Those moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion， are what I remember most clearly about the first days and weeks. I have no memory of telling anyone the details， but I must have done so， because everyone seemed to know them. At one point I considered the possibility that they had picked up the details of the story from one another， but immediately rejected it： the story they had was in each instance too accurate to have been passed from hand to hand. It had come from me.