Chapter 2 focuses on literary representations of the consumption of such mediated crime stories. I analyze Moderato cantabile (1958) and Dix heures et demie du soir en été (1960), to illustrate how Duras thematizes reader identification with sensational crimes in the media by staging the identification of her heroines with fait divers-style crimes of her own invention. Where in “La Maladie de la douleur” [The Malady of Grief] Julia Kristeva (Soleil noir,1987) claims that Duras’s work is non-cathartic, I contend that Duras uses the model of an anonymous fait divers to demonstrate how reader/witness identification with “true” crime and its aftermath can occasion the processing and purging of the intense affective responses they inspire.