(单词翻译:单击)
She fought all of that not by changing herself, or by developing some ball-breaking personality.
她不是通过改变自己，也不是通过发展什么颠覆性的个性来对抗这一切。
She did it by staying exactly as she was—unsentimental, strong, deeply feminine, and a bit of a seductress—and writing sentence after sentence that cut the great men of New Journalism off at the knees.
她完全保持了自己的本色——冷静、坚强、极具女人味，有点儿诱惑力——一字一句地把新新闻学的伟人们驳得心服口服。
Those sentences, those first two collections—who could ever compete with them?
那些句子，那些前两个作品集中的句子——谁能与之匹敌?
Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album created a new vocabulary of essay writing, one whose influence is on display every day of the week in the tide of personal essays published online by young writers.
《向伯利恒跋涉》和《白色相册》创造了新的文章写作词汇，在年轻写手们每天在网上发表个人文章的潮流中，这些词汇的影响力每天都在显现。
Those collections changed the way many people thought about nonfiction, and even the way they thought about themselves.
这些作品集改变了许多人对非虚构作品的看法，甚至改变了他们对自己的看法。
A thousand critics have addressed the worthy task of locating the errors of logic in those essays and calling out the various engines that turn the wheels: narcissism, whiteness, wealth.
数以千计的评论家设法完成了一项有价值的任务，即找出这些文章中的逻辑错误，并高喊推动这错误车轮转动的各种引擎：自恋、白人和财富。
Frustrated by the entire cult of Didion, they’ve tried to crash it down by making a reasonable case against its foundational texts.
他们懊恼人们对狄迪恩的崇拜，试图通过对其基本文本提出合理的理由来击垮它。
God knows, none of that is heavy lifting. Joan Didion: guilty as charged.
天知道，这些都不是什么难事。 琼·狄迪恩: 罪名成立。
But what no one has ever located is what makes so many people feel possessive not just of the stories, but also of their connection to the writer.
但从来没有人找到，是什么让这么多人不仅对故事有占有欲，而且对他们与作者的联系有占有欲。
What is it about these essays that takes so many people hostage?
这些文章为什么会挟持这么多人?
At a certain point in her decline, I was gingerly asked if I would write an obituary. No, I would not.
在她病情每况愈下的某个时刻，有人小心翼翼地问我是否愿意写一篇讣告。我拒绝了，我不会写。
I was not on that particular train. I was on the train of trying to keep her alive.
我不是那个行列的人。 我是努力想让她活下来的那个行列的人。
I wanted to feel close to her—not to the mega-celebrity, very rich, New York Joan Didion.
我想和她亲近，而不是和纽约的超级名人、非常富有的琼·狄迪恩亲近。
I wanted to feel close to the girl who came from Nowhere, California (have you ever been to Sacramento?), and blasted herself into the center of everything.
我想要与那个来自加州无名之地的(你去过萨克拉门托吗?)，然后把自己炸到万物中心的女孩亲近。
I wanted to feel close to the young woman who’d gone to Berkeley, and studied with professors I knew, and relied on them—as I had once relied on them—to show her a path.
我想与这位上过伯克利，和我认识的教授一起学习，依靠他们的女子亲近——就像我曾经依靠他们一样——为她指明道路。
The thing to do was get in the car and drive. I would go and find her in the places where she’d lived.
要做的事儿就是上车以及开车。 我会去她住过的地方寻找她。
The trip began in my own house in Los Angeles, with me doing something that had never occurred to me before: I Googled the phrase Joan Didion’s house Sacramento.
这段旅行从我在洛杉矶的家中开始启程，我做了一件以前从未想过的事:我在谷歌上搜索了琼·狄迪恩萨克拉门托的家。
Even as I did, I felt that it was a mistake, that something as solid and irrefutable as a particular house on a particular street might put a rent in what she would have called “the enchantment under which I’ve lived my life.”
就在我这么做的时候，我觉得这是一个错误，像特定街道上的特定房子这样坚固而无可辩驳的东西，可能会让她所说的“我置身其中的魅力”产生租金。
Too late: A color photograph was already blooming on the screen.
太晚了:一张彩色照片已经在屏幕上展开了。
