JOAN Didion MAPPING GRIEF

"A PLACE NONE OF US KNOW UNTIL WE REACH IT": MAPPING GRIEF AND MEMORY IN
JOAN DIDION'S "THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING"

Author(s): MARTA BLADEK
Source: Biography, Vol. 37, No. 4 (fall 2014), pp. 935-952
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24570316
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"a place none of us know until we reach it":
MAPPING GRIEF AND MEMORY IN JOAN DIDION's
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
MARTA BLADEK
Grief dislocates both space and time. The grief-struck find themselves in
a new geography, where other peoples maps are only ever approximate.
—Julian Barnes
[M]burning and memory are symbiotically linked... the one does not stir
in the mind without the other also stirring.
—Liz Stanley
"[Wjhen you sign on to be a wife, you are signing on to being a widow one
day, possibly," Joyce Carol Oates remarks in A Widow's Story, her 2011 mem
oir describing her painful transition from a content wife to a grief-stricken
widow (103). By reminding herself that widowhood is what Anne Martin
Matthews, a noted sociologist of aging, calls "an expectable life event" (340),
the grief-struck and inconsolable Oates tries to rationalize her loss: "So we
should tell ourselves, when we are hurt, devastated" (103). Outliving a hus
band, a loss the seventy-year-old Oates struggles to accept in her own life,
is hardly an uncommon occurrence. Present demographic trends show that
"Half of all marriages end with the death of the husband, but only one fifth
with the death of the wife. ... In North America, nearly half of women
aged 65 and over are widowed, with this proportion increasing to four fifths
of those aged 85 and over" (Martin-Matthews 340).1 Although searing and
obliterating, the pain Oates suffers is not exceptional: most married women
her age already have or will soon experience their husband's death.
Given the current demographic patterns of spousal loss, as well as the fact
that the oldest Baby Boomers began turning 65 in 2011, it is not surprising
Biography 37.4 (Fall 2014) © Biographical Research Center
936 Biography 37.4 (Fall 2014)
that in recent years first-person narratives recounting the ordeal have been
finding a large and receptive audience.2 Reviewing A Widow's Story, the New
York Times critic Janet Maslin places Oates's memoir in "the increasingly lu
crative loss-of-spouse market," a publishing niche spawned by the critical
and popular success of Joan Didion's 2005 The Year of Magical Thinking. In
her bestselling memoir, later adapted into a Broadway play starring Vanessa
Redgrave, Didion chronicles the first twelve months following her daughter
Quintana's septic shock and her husband John Gregory Dunnes fatal cardi
ac arrest on December 30, 2003. Indeed, by the time A Widow's Story came
out, six years after The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion's was merely the
best known out of many spousal loss memoirs on the market. Calvin Trillin's
About Alice (2006) and Anne Roiphe's Epilogue (2008) are but two notable
post-2005 texts that tapped into the popularity of the genre. Didion's influ
ence notwithstanding, The Year of Magical Thinking was not the first memoir
to recount the loss of a spouse. In Companionship in Grief (2010), Jeffrey
Berman traces the genre's beginning to C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed. As
Berman notes, Lewis's text not only remains "the most famous memoir of
spousal loss but also the one to which later memoirists refer" (8).
THE RISE OF THE GRIEF MEMOIR
If, as Berman proposes, A Grief Observed, published in 1961, is the text

paved the way for subsequent memoirs of spousal bereavement, the g
relatively recent, even as the experience it takes as its subject is not. The r
the grief memoir, Sandra Gilbert suggests in Death's Door: Modern Dying
the Ways We Grieve (2006), coincided with the sociocultural shift as a res
which death has been denaturalized and removed from the public dis
only to enter instead the professionalized discourse of medicine and resea
(xx-xxi). These changing attitudes towards death and grief have been
ined in depth by a number of critics and scholars. In her now classic stud
American Way of Death (1963), Jessica Mitford offers a biting critique of
funeral industry that at once epitomizes and informs the public's discom
with death as an idea and as a fact of life. Mitford's exposition of the fla
trade practices (embalming, expensive caskets, elaborate wakes, amon
ers) contrasts the present-day customs with earlier ones. She argues that
course of the twentieth century the American funeral devolved into
fledged burlesque" whose very extravagance makes death disappear from
(201). Indeed, "the invisible death," Philippe Ariès argues in The Hour
Death (1981), characterizes contemporary society's resolve to deny and ba
death, to carry on "as if nobody died anymore" (560). Aries's social histor
Bladek, Mapping Grief and Memory in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking 937
Western attitudes towards death and dying shows how, over time, they have
ceased to be experienced as natural events in the life course; nowadays, people
rarely encounter death before they are struck with a personal loss. Because
the traditional death-related practices have by now become obsolete, newly
bereaved individuals can no longer depend on communal structures to guide
them through loss. Modern grief memoirs emerge out of a context in which
death, dying, and mourning have become taboo.
Consequently, when defining the genre s characteristics, Kathleen Fowler
finds that "one central theme regularly recurs in the grief memoir—the sense
of finding oneself navigating uncharted territory" (528). Losing and griev
ing a loved one is at "the heart of the text" that invariably grapples with the
meaning of life and death, as well as other existential questions occasioned
by loss (527). As they strive to portray the dead in his or her uniqueness, the
mourners find provisional solace in writing. "Grief," Fowler observes, "can
become almost unlivable and the memoir becomes a means to try to contain
it, to comprehend it, to make it bearable" (547). Like Fowler, Berman notes
the healing aspect of first-person accounts of loss and life in deaths aftermath.
For the mourning memoirists, writing about the experience of losing a loved
one provides "the writing cure," a textual equivalent to the "talking cure" in
psychotherapy (18).
This essay builds on Gilberts, Fowlers, and Berman's readings of grief
memoirs as narratives that expand our understanding of bereavement. In par
ticular, it focuses on the aspect of grief to which the earlier critical analyses
of the genre have not attended—the spatiality of mourning, or the ways in
which the newly bereaved experience specific locations over time. Given its by
now canonical status as the exemplary grief memoir, I read The Year of Magi
cal Thinking as a narrative that illuminates mourning as inherently tempo
ral and spatial. I show that Didion's encounters with locations she associates
with the time before Quintana's illness and John's death map the trajectory
of her grief. Didion's evolving experience of the vortex effect, as she refers to
a place's ability to set forward a series of memorial associations, especially re
veals the spatial dimension of mourning. Two currently important theoreti
cal strands within bereavement studies—spatiality and memory/memorial
ization—inform my analysis. To explore the spatio-temporal quality of grief
that The Year of Magical Thinking highlights, I draw on the work of cultural
geographers, in particular Avril Maddrell's research on spaces and practices of
mourning and remembrance in the British Isles. The philosopher Edward C.
Casey's phenomenological study of place and memory, in turn, provides the
main framework through which I interpret Didion's rendering of the relation
ship between location and remembering.
SPATIALITY OF GRIEF
"[G]rief and mourning are experienced and marked in space, as we

time," Avril Maddrell and James D. Sidaway point out in their introd
to Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying and Bereavement, a collection de
ed to the "spatial turn" in the study of death and mourning (1). Grie
tial dimension, however, is often overlooked. Even as "[w] ithin contemp
western discourse, death itself is often described in spatial terms: a 'fin
ney', 'crossing to the other side', 'going to a better place'," grief continu
be perceived as a temporal phenomenon that unravels over time and rem
"typically represented in temporal terms: 'time heals', 'give it time'
drell and Sidaway 1). The emphasis on grief's unfolding over time n
its spatial aspect, the varied ways in which mourning and its accomp
emotions are experienced in space. Grief, Maddrell argues, may be m
"An individual's experience of bereavement changes their relation to
lar spaces and places and . . . this becomes a dynamic internal map o
ing patterns of emotion and affect, both painful and comforting" ("Map
Grief" 58). After the death of a loved one, spaces and places formerly ex
enced as neutral acquire an emotional valence in relation to the dead.3
some trigger the mourner's distress, others provide comfort and respite
the pain of grief. As they move through geographical space, the bereave
ally navigate a landscape of loss, their world transformed by the absence
now deceased. Mappable grief attests to ways in which places store and e
memories; no less importantly, the spatiality of grief also shows that m
and acts of remembrance are crucial to the process of mourning.
MEMORIAL POTENCY OF PLACE
Whereas Maddrell and Sidaway offer a pointed critique of valorizing the

poral aspect of grief and mourning over their spatial dimension, Edw
Casey argues against the emphasis on temporality over spatiality in
erations of memory and remembering. Although "the relationship b
memory and place is at once intimate and profound," Casey writes
membering: A Phenomenological Study, the spatial aspect of rememb
"memory of place, of having been in a place"—is "one of the most c
ously neglected areas of philosophical or psychological inquiry" (183
in the original). The phenomenology of place Casey puts forward se
a corrective to these limited conceptualizations. The close affinity b
place and memory, he explains, can be attributed to the very similar fu
each of them serves. Casey describes their common task as "that of cong
the disparate into a provisional unity ' (202; italics in the original). W
place holds objects and things together, memory "draw[s] together diverse
moments of time" (202). Since, as Casey observes, "both roles, the one of
containing and the other synthesizing, are fundamentally 'reservative,'" place
and memory "reinforce each other" (203). In consequence, place possesses
"intrinsic memorability," and memory is "naturally place-oriented or at least
place-supported" (186-87). Place's ability to hold memories, or its "memorial
potency," as Casey calls it, results in its "memorial evocativeness" (202; 198).
When we revisit an already familiar place, we are inspired to remember the
experiences we associate with the location. Place, then, not only locates mem
ories of the past, but it also facilitates remembering. "Rather than thinking
of remembering as a form of re-experiencing the past per se" Casey suggests,
"we might conceive of it as an activity of re-implacing: re-experiencing past
places" (201; italics in the original). When we remember a particular time, we
actually remember having been in a particular place.
Casey's insights resonate in the work of cultural geographers who, like
Maddrell and Sidaway, investigate spaces of death, mourning, and remem
brance. In Geography and Memory, Owain Jones and Joanne Garde-Hansen
describe remembering as "inherently geographic in two senses: that of being
of past spaces as well as past times, and in terms of the prompting and prac
tice of memories by and in current space" (19). By their intrinsic ability to
anchor memories and trigger remembering, places constitute "powerful ele
ments off emotional geographies of the self" (Jones 213). It is places' memo
rial and emotional evocativeness that gives mourning its spatial quality.
MOURNING AND REMEMBERING
As it registers the shifting pattern of the mourner's emotional reactions

places associated with the dead, grief not only exposes the intimate re
ship between place and memory, but it also reveals remembering as
tegral part of bereavement. Indeed, Jones and Garde-Hansen suggest
"Grief is a certain, and very powerful, form of memory" ("Identity" 21)
membering is at the center of the grief model Sigmund Freud proposes
classic 1917 study "Mourning and Melancholia." Freud defines the t
mourning as the "long-drawn-out and gradual" withdrawal of the eg
bidinal attachment to the lost object (256). Only after the mourner has r
nized and accepted the loss can the reconstitution of her shattered ego b
(244-45). The detachment is accomplished through hypercathexis, a pr
facilitated by remembering the lost object: "Each single one of the memo
and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up
hypercathected" (245). Consumed by grief, the bereaved hold on to m
ries of their dead. Through remembering, they remain connected to the
one whose death they are not yet able to accept. While initially remembering
the dead helps keep them alive, with time it ceases to provide the comfort
of denial. Instead, memories of the past in which the dead were still present
are reminders of their absence. They require that the mourners eventually ac
knowledge their loss. This dynamic of grief, the shifting pattern of memories
that lessen or intensify distress, manifests itself in the mourner's relationship
to places linked with memories of the dead. Maddrell's concept of mapping
grief, then, implicitly invokes place's memorial evocativenss and memory's
central role in mourning.
The interrelated concepts of grief as spatialized experience, place as pre
server of and trigger for memories, and remembering as a crucial aspect of the
mourning process inform my reading of Didion's memoir. I suggest that The
Year of Magical Thinking is, using Maddrell's term, Didion's grief map that
charts mourning across space and time, revealing memory's centrality to grief
as it does so.
Throughout her narrative, Didion employs spatial imagery to convey the
sense of loss and grief by describing her returns to familiar locations or vis
its to unfamiliar ones. As she attends to her daughter Quintana's worsening
condition, still in shock over her husband John's sudden death, Didion often
finds herself in places—her and John's apartment, the streets of Los Angeles
and New York, hotel rooms, and favorite restaurants—that make her remem
ber events from her family's life together. Repeatedly "sideswiped by memo
ries," Didion refers to these place-induced resurfacings of the past as "the
vortex effect" (197; 107). Early on, returns to familiar places are unbearable.
The vortex effect alerts Didion to the precariousness of her present, John's
absence, and Quintana's illness. Unfamiliar spaces, on the other hand, locate
Didion's new post-loss experiences and thus function as painful reminders
that her life must now continue without the companionship of her husband
or daughter. Insofar as they require that Didion confront and acknowledge
her double loss, encounters with specific places mark the trajectory of her
mourning, facilitating the work of grief. With time, and only after Didion
resigns herself to living alone, does the intensity of the vortex effect subside.
Even as Didion remains painfully aware of John's and Quintana's absence,
returns to familiar places and visits to new locations become less distressing.
THE VORTEX EFFECT
"I had first noticed what I came to know as 'the vortex effect' in Januar
when I was watching the ice floes form on the East River from a window at
Beth Israel North," writes Didion, remembering the day she became awa
that certain places call up memories of the past (107). Realizing that he
daughter's hospital room's unusual "rose-patterned wallpaper border, a Doro

thy Draper touch" must be a remainder from the time the place still used to
be Doctors' Hospital, the newly widowed Didion unexpectedly finds her
self remembering a summer decades ago (107). Doctors' Hospital was where
one of her coworkers at Vogue underwent an abortion paid for by the dis
trict attorney's office (107). The seemingly random memory allows Didion
to experience a temporary release from the present she can't bring herself to
face—John is dead; Quintana has not regained consciousness for days. Going
back to the past, Didion admits as she follows her memory's unfolding, "had
seemed better than thinking about why I was at Beth Israel North" (107).
In her memory, after all, Doctors' Hospital has not yet become Beth Israel
North, the place where her daughter is now in a coma; Quintana herself has
not yet been born. By remembering herself away Didion can, albeit tempo
rarily, evade the unbearable present. Yet, the respite her memories afford her
turns out to be both short-lived and illusory. When her memory of Doctors'
Hospital leads her to remember the time she was writing a novel that incor
porated the abortion incident, Didion is suddenly aware that "I had hit more
dangerous water but there had seemed no turning back" (110). Having pur
posefully eased herself into the past, she stumbles across a memory that in
volves a three-year-old Quintana. As it exposes the striking contrast between
Quintana as a young child in full health and Quintana as an adult in critical
condition, the particular recollection plunges Didion back into the present
she has tried to leave behind. She remembers the reason why she is at the hos
pital right now. "There it was, the vortex," Didion sums up the shock of her
involuntary return to Beth Israel North (110).
Didion's first experience of the vortex effect sets up a paradigm for the
ones that follow. Every time she visits or passes by a place John and Quin
tana knew as well, memories of their life together overwhelm her. While such
spontaneous remembering momentarily drowns out the painful present, it
inevitably leads Didion back to it as soon as a memory of her husband or
daughter comes up. Revealing the ways in which place can both hold and
provoke memories, the vortex invariably culminates in Didion's return to the
present. The jolt of the vortex cancels out the provisional relief remembering
has offered, as it ultimately asserts the irrevocability of the loss not yet fully
registered in Didion's memory.
The Beth Israel North hospital where Didion experiences her first vortex
is hardly the only place that reminds Didion of her loss by evoking memories
of John and Quintana. During her five-week-long stay in Los Angeles where
her daughter is being hospitalized at UCLA, Didion repeatedly passes by the
neighborhoods she knows from the time when she and her family used to
live there. Driving one day, she notices a movie theater where she and John
first saw The Graduate in 1967 (118). Its surroundings have changed, but
the theater itself has remained "if only to trap the unwary," as Didion bit
terly comments on its disturbing presence (118). Caught by surprise, she
finds herself remembering the evening she and John had dinner and saw the
movie together (118). A few days later, another vortex overcomes Didion.
When she realizes that the store where she wants to buy bottled water is ex
actly where the Bistro—the restaurant where she and John often ate—once
was, she turns back and walks away (120-21). The vortex, however, has al
ready caught her in. Unable to avert it, Didion suddenly remembers the ear
ly years of her marriage during which she and John frequently dined at the
Bistro. This memory paves way for another one. She recalls the family lunch
on the day of Quintana's adoption. Reflecting on this particular celebration,
in turn, reminds Didion of her daughter's sixth or seventh birthday dinner,
an occasion on which Quintana wore a dress Didion and John bought for
her on their trip to Bogota (120-21). These place-evoked memories plunge
Didion deeper into her grief. Remembering the life she shared with her hus
band and daughter, Didion remembers that she might have already lost both
of them: John is no longer alive; there is a very real possibility that Quintana
may not recover. Back in familiar places, Didion may temporarily reenter the
past, but these revisits inevitably lead to the painful realization that she has
already outlived it and must now confront "the unending absence that fol
lows" the loss of her loved ones (189).
While she can neither avert nor stop the vortex once it is triggered, Did
ion believes she may take precautions to shun places that carry such "poten
tially tricky associations" (176). She is determined to steer away from any
venues that hold memories of either John or Quintana. On purpose, she
avoids "previously untested territory" by not stepping beyond "terra cogni
ta," the neighborhoods in which she can be sure she will not encounter fa
miliar sights (118). Paradoxically, it is the areas she already knows to which
Didion refers to as "terra incognita." While she remembers these places well
enough to anticipate the risk of being sucked into a vortex, she cannot con
trol her reaction to the memories these locations may call up. Threatened by
the unpredictability of familiar places, Didion engages in elaborate plotting
of her comings and goings around Los Angeles:
Never once in five weeks did I drive into the part of Brentwood in which we had
lived from 1978 until 1988. When I saw a dermatologist in Santa Monica and
street work forced me to pass within three blocks of our house in Brentwood, I
did not look left or right. Never once in five weeks did I drive up the Pacific Coast
Highway to Malibu. ... I could avoid driving to UCLA on Sunset. I could avoid
passing the intersection at Sunset and Beverly Glen where for six years I had turned
off to the Westlake School for Girls. (115)
Such determined evasions "require ingenuity" on Didion's part, but they en

able her to hold on to the "cool customer" persona she desperately struggles to
maintain in the days when Quintana's condition remains unstable (113). Steer
ing clear of the route that passes by her old neighborhood, Didion attempts to
prevent the intrusion of the present into the places that map her past. At the
same time as the vortex enacts what Casey refers to as "re-implacing\ re-expe
riencing past places," its ultimate effect is the exposure of places as inherently
temporal (201). Taking Didion back to the past via a specific place, the vortex
temporarily displaces the present only to jolt her back into it again as she real
izes that her memory of a particular place is, unavoidably, a memory of another
time. Every time Didion experiences the vortex, she must accept that memo
ries are held, but time is not arrested, in place.
As it inexplicably fails to set off a vortex, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where
Didion has stayed on many of her previous visits to Los Angeles, is the notable
exception to the rule that her re-entry into familiar places provokes a "sudden
rush of memories" of the past (118). Although "its every corridor was perme
ated with the associations I was trying to avoid," Didion observes, the hotel
constituted an "exempt zone" (118; 114). Didion herself "remain [s] unclear"
(113) why the Beverly Wilshire does not trigger the vortex, but her description
of the place suggests it is the hotel's seeming permanence and insularity that
allow her to re-experience the past not yet mired by the imminent loss:
I knew the housekeepers. I knew the manicurists. I knew the doorman who would
give John the bottled water when he came back from walking in the morning. I
knew by reflex how to work the key and open the safe and adjust the shower head:
I had stayed over the years in some dozens of rooms identical to the one in which I
was now staying. (114)
The hotel's unchanged facilities, the staff she still recognizes, and the ease
with which she resumes old habits comfort Didion into denial. She is able to
keep the memory of her recent past and its painful losses at bay. At a place
that appears frozen in time and among people who do not realize how much
her life has unravelled, Didion can give in to magical thinking, her impossible
wish that John's death be reversible and Quintana's condition non-life-threat
ening. She clings to the Beverly Wilshire as "the only safe place for me to be,
the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would
know or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be
the person I had been before any of this happened" (Didion 118). Whereas
other familiar places to which Didion returns put in motion a series of rec
ollections that ultimately shock her back into the present, the hotel is not a
trigger for memories but a shelter for the past. During her stay at the Bev
erly Wilshire, Didion feels safely ensconced in her old life because the hotel
mobilizes place's inherently reservative quality, or its ability to hold the past
"steadily within its own embrace" (Casey 184).
Outside of the Beverly Wilshire, there are no other places that would
protect Didion from the finality of John's heart attack and the severity of
Quintana's illness. When she agrees to cover the 2004 Democratic conven
tion, Didion admits having "not anticipated that my new fragility would
travel with me to Boston, a city devoid, I thought, of potentially tricky as
sociations" (175-76). Although she makes sure to keep her distance from
the places that might remind her of her husband or daughter, Didion nev
ertheless stumbles into an unbearably painful memory of John. "Something
déjà vu" about the hotel room where Didion is staying makes her recall her
first visit to Boston in the summer before her senior year in college (179).
She remembers that all these years ago she also stayed at the Parker House
Hotel, in a room not very different from the one she has now (178-80). The
subsequent unfolding of memories puts Didion at ease. "For so long as I was
thinking about the summer of 1955 I would not be thinking about John
and Quintana," she tells herself (179). The calm and comfort turn out to
be unsustainable, however, as an even earlier memory of Christmastime and
high school dances in Sacramento resurfaces. It makes Didion remember
"the places on the river we went to after the dances. I thought about the fog
on the levee driving home" (180). When she wakes up a few hours later, the
thick fog on the levee is still on her mind, calling up other memories. Sacra
mento, Didion realizes too late, was not the only "place in my life where the
fog got so thick that I had to walk ahead of the car" (180). The other place
Didion remembers just then is
The house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The one to which we brought Quintana when she was three days old.
When you came off the Harbor Freeway and though San Pedro and onto the
drive above the sea you hit the fog.
You (I) got out of the car to walk the white line.
The driver of the car was John. (180)
The memory of a house her family used to live in is intolerable. "I did not risk
waiting for the panic to follow," Didion explains her sudden decision to pack
and leave Boston at once (180). The cut-short visit makes her realize that the
pain of loss does not just inhere in places that call up memories of John or
Quintana. Rather, she herself brings it with her whenever she goes.
Having narrowly escaped the vortex effect, on a flight to New York Did
ion muses about the expansive beauty of the views from the plane's windows
(180). When she recalls some of the most memorable airplane vistas she has
seen—the opening up of the American West, the islands on the Arctic sea,
the seas between Greece and Cyprus, the Alps—she is struck with the realiza
tion that she "saw all those things with John" (181). His company was always
a part of the experience of appreciating the beauty of a place. Without her
husband by her side, Didion will not be able to see the places in the same way
again. "How could I go to Paris without him, how could I go back to Milan,
Honolulu, Bogota?," she laments (181). The inability to share her wonder
with John is only one reason why Didion finds the thought of solitary returns
crushing. As she has already discovered in Los Angeles and Boston, the famil
iar places she revisits alone at once evoke John's past presence and expose his
present absence. Making her remember that John is no longer with her, soli
tary returns are painful reminders that her life goes on without him. Back in
the places she and her husband visited together, Didion must face the grow
ing distance between John and herself.
As Didion observes, the structure of the vortex each solitary return to
familiar places provokes—the overflow of memories that temporarily offer
comfort and relief but are then followed by an abrupt and painful realization
that the loss of her loved one is irrevocable—resembles Freud's conception
of the work of grief (133). She is especially drawn to a passage on the hyper
cathexis of lost objects, a process that evokes the vortex's familiar dynamic
(133).4 Remembering Quintana and John, Didion understands all too well,
upholds the bond she is not yet ready to let go of. On the other hand, memo
ries of her daughter and husband repeatedly confront Didion with the fact
that she can no longer count on their presence in her life. The vortex, then,
performs "the testing of reality," as Freud refers to the mourner's ongoing os
cillation between denial and acknowledgment of loss (244).
Magical thinking, also a symptom of the beareved Didion's altered men
tal and emotional states, is another case of reality-testing, which, as Freud
writes, can include "a turning away from reality . . . and a clinging to the
object through the medium of hallucinatory wishful psychosis" (244). Like
the vortex, magical thinking revolves around the act of coming back, but it
is John's return that is at the center of Didion's impossible wish. Her "year
of magical thinking," Didion writes, begins on the first night after her hus
band's death (33). She declines all offers of company and insists on spending
the night by herself. "I needed to be alone," she explains her reasoning, "so
that he could come back" (33). In the months that followed, Didion admits,
'"bringing him back' had been ... my hidden focus, a magic trick" (44). The
irrational belief "that what had happened remained reversible" provided ref
uge from the unbearable alternative, the finality of John's death (32). The de
lusional hope that her husband's absence is but temporary and he will soon
rejoin her determines how Didion goes about dealing with the tasks that
befall her as a new widow. She is unable to remove John's shoes; she can
not bring herself to agree to donate his organs. "How could he come back if
they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?," Didion
justifies her reluctance (41). When she hears an interview with Teresa Heinz
Kerry, who talks about her pressing need to leave Washington and go back to
her home in Pittsburgh as soon as she learned about her first husband's death
in a plane crash, Didion immediately makes sense of the woman's decision:
"Of course she 'needed' to go back to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, not Washing
ton, was the place to which he might come back" (38). Insofar as it prolongs
the existence of the lost loved one, magical thinking, for a brief while, sus
pends the painful awareness of loss's irreversibility. Just like the vortex before
it culminates, Didion's "magic trick" temporarily averts the death she is not
yet able to accept as final (44).
Not surprisingly, then, Didion reads a newspaper science story that dis
cusses the potential of turning back time and changing the course of events
as a confirmation of her own hope for John's imminent return. The article
explains that the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawkings recent retraction of
his earlier views in effect upholds "'a basic tenet of modern physics: that it
is always possible to reverse time, run the proverbial film backward and re
construct what happened in, say, the collision of two cars or the collapse of a
dead star into a black hole'" (Dennis Overbye qtd. in Didion 181). The same
belief structures Didion's magical thinking, her desperate conviction that her
actions may undo John's death and bring him back.
A shift in Didion's grieving process comes when, for the first time, she
experiences the vortex without its usual effects, the obliterating distress to
which her memories of John and Quintana invariably lead. On the opening
day of the August 2004 Republican convention in New York, Didion finds
herself in the Tower C escalator at Madison Square Garden (182). She im
mediately remembers the last time she was there: in November, on the night
before their trip to Paris, she and John came to see a Knicks game. As it hap
pens, they took the same escalator she is on now. Not surprisingly, another
memory follows this one. In the summer of 1992 Didion was covering the
Democratic convention, also held at the Garden. Each night John would
pick her up, and they would have dinner together at Coco Pazzo (183). The
unfolding of memories is almost predictable; Didion is no longer astonished
when one recollection seamlessly leads into another. This vortex, however,
differs from all the ones that came before it. As she goes over the sequence of
the memories that surfaced on the Tower C escalator, Didion becomes aware
that she does not wish to change the past:
I had stood on this escalator thinking about those days and nights without
once thinking I could change their outcome. I realized that since the last morning
of 2003, the morning after he died, I had been trying to reverse time, run the film
backward.
It was now eight months later, August 30, 2004, and I still was.
The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to
substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the
collapse of the dead star. (183-84)
In contrast to others that preceded it, this particular vortex is no more than a
reconstructive memory. It takes Didion back to the time John was still alive,
but these recollections are already infused with her knowledge that her hus
band is dead. For the first time, Didion's memory does not suspend John's
death; it already contains it. Although the vortex takes over, Didion enters the
past without leaving the present. She no longer believes there is an alterna
tive to John's death. When Didion reflects on the dead star and film reel from
the Hawking news story, she now sees them as proof that past losses may be
remembered but not undone. Early on the vortex effect was crushing precise
ly because it exposed Didion's magical thinking, the hope that John would
return, as untenable. The unfolding of memories on the Tower C escalator,
however, does not cancel Didion's awareness that there is nothing she could
have done or could now do to have her husband back.
The vortex's function changes, then, as Didion emerges from the stage in
which "Grief was passive. Grief happened" (143). Her ability to remember
her husband without giving in to despair signals the beginning of a subtle
transition. Nearly a year after John's death, place-inspired recollections no
longer make Didion forget John's death; the events of December 30, 2003
have already become an indelible part of her memory. The vortex now lacks
an effect because loss is already inscribed in the attachment it enacts. On
the Tower C escalator at Madison Square Garden, for the first time, Didion
comes to understand that John's death has changed rather than canceled out
the bond between her and her husband.
Didion's intimation of her transformed, albeit continuing, relationship to
John echoes contemporary understanding of mourning. Informed by Freud's
theory, the traditional twentieth-century view of bereavement has empha
sized "a process of 'letting go' of one's attachment to the deceased person,"
the psychologist Robert Neimeyer notes (2). New theoretical models depart
from the conception of the tasks of mourning as "the relinquishment of emo
tional ties and a stagic progression toward recovery"; instead, they recognize
"the potentially healthy role of continued symbolic bonds with the deceased
person" (Neimeyer 3).5 Rather than "getting over a loss and on with life,"
then, mourning is defined as "living with loss" (Leader 99). Even after the
bereaved has recognized and accepted the death of his or her loved one, the
loss remains a felt absence in his or her life.
"The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. I look for
resolution and find none," Didion remarks shortly after the first anniver
sary of John's death (225). At the same time as she fears that her memories
of him will lose their sharpness and fade away, she reflects that in her new
life without her husband she has already made new ones that do not involve
him at all. Crossing Lexington Avenue one day, she ponders the necessity of
holding on to John's memory even as "keeping time by last year's calendar"
is no longer possible (225). The logic that underwrites the fated attempt to
go on as if the dead were still with us, Didion offers, can be brought down
to this: "we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us" (225). At
the heart of grief, as Didion's year of magical thinking has revealed, there
is the impossible wish and vain hope for the dead's imminent return. To
Didion, the very supposition of giving up the wait feels like a betrayal not
mitigated by her recognition "that if we are to live ourselves there comes a
point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead"
(225-26). Those who are still alive, not the dead, commit the ultimate de
parture. What makes Didion lose "all sense of oncoming traffic" on Lexing
ton Avenue that day is the unbearable thought that it is John, not she, who
has been left behind (226).
In the passages concluding The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion in
vokes the broken promise of return. After she leaves a lei, a Hawai'i Christ
mas souvenir, for her husband at St. John the Divine, she remembers that
travelers who were leaving Honolulu on the Matson Lines would throw leis
on the water in a gesture that anticipated their coming back. Inevitably,
"The leis would get caught in the wake and go bruised and brown, the way
the gardenias in the pool filter at the house in Brentwood Park had gone
bruised and brown" (226). She brings up the sunken and browned leis again
as she reflects on her failure to remember one of the rooms in her and John's
house in Brentwood Park. Deeply saddened by her own forgetfulness, she
comments: "The lei I left at St. John the Divine would have gone brown by
now. Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands van
ish, rooms get forgotten" (226-27). She cannot prevent all these changes
from happening; they all occur without her. Among the wilting flowers,
disappearing islands, and forgotten rooms, even memory itself is revealed to
be no more than, to borrow the novelist Andrew O'Hagan's phrase, "a place
of fading togetherness" (191) to which Didion can only look back, but not
return.
CONCLUSION
Grief memoirs, Jeffrey Berman argues, "dramatize both personal and cu

al mourning, casting much light on the nature and process of bereave
(254). Depicting grief as an experience that unfolds not only over tim
also over space, The Year of Magical Thinking corrects our conception of
as predominantly temporal. As she retrospectively chronicles the firs
following her husband's death, Didion literally charts her grief's traje
Describing Didion's anguished encounters with familiar places, her
rate schemes to avoid certain locations because of the emotions they prov
and the overwhelming effects of the place-induced vortex, The Year of M
cal Thinking affirms Avril Maddrell's model of grief as mappable. D
memoir shows that the newly bereaved find themselves in a landscape of
among places that invoke the present absence of their loved ones. In p
lar, the evolving effects of the vortex chart the unravelling of Didion's
Whereas the earliest experience of the vortex at the Beth Israel North H
tal overwhelms Didion, the last one, on a Madison Square Garden esca
marks her acquiescence to loss. Capturing the spatial aspect of grief, The
of Magical Thinking also engages what Edward Casey refers to as the
rial potency and evocativeness of places. The vortex, Didion herself r
early on, is caused by familiar locations' tendency to trigger memorie
culminate in the unbearable realization that her husband and daughter ar
longer with her. Once aware of the intimate relationship between pla
memory, Didion carefully steers clear from locations that would call
past she shared with John and Quintana. Although grief remains, as
puts it, "a place none of us know until we reach it" (188), The Year of Ma
Thinking adds to our understanding of bereavement by illuminating
spatial dimension, as well as the role remembering, often inspired by spe
places associated with the lost loved ones, plays in mourning.
NOTES
These numbers, as Martin-Matthews points out, should be understood in the context of

the changing patterns of spousal loss. For example, Ingrid A. Connidis's 2010 analysis
of existing widowhood data for the US and Canada, for both women and men, revealed
that over the last thirty-five years older adults have become less likely to lose a spouse,
due to factors such as longer life spans and divorce rates. Still, as the oldest members
of the Boomer generation (a cohort born between 1946 and 1964) reached the age of
sixty-five in 2011, the number of people confronting the death of a life partner will grow
(Martin-Matthews 340).
In 2011, the Baby Boomer population was 77 million (Colby and Ortman 2). Be
cause men's mortality rates are higher than women's at every age, loss of a spouse is
significantly more prevalent among older women than men (Colby and Ortman 5).
In 2010, "Women age 65 and over were three times as likely as men of the same age
to be widowed, 40 percent compared with 13 percent" (Federal Interagency Forum).
The Administration on Aging projects that as many as 7 out of 10 married Baby Boom
women will become widows (2013).
Geographers differentiate between space and place. While the former is neutral, the
latter implies significance, or an emotional connection between an individual and the
physical location. Yi-Fu Tuan elaborates the distinction in his influential Space and
Place: The Perspective of Experience. In this essay I follow this distinction.
The passage Didion quotes at length is the same one I refer to on page 939 to highlight
the important role memory plays in the process of mourning.
For a comprehensive review of western theories of mourning, see also Hagman, and
Rothaupt and Becker.
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JOAN Didion MAPPING GRIEF

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"A PLACE NONE OF US KNOW UNTIL WE REACH IT": MAPPING GRIEF AND MEMORY IN

JOAN DIDION'S "THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING"

Biography 37.4 (Fall 2014) © Biographical Research Center

THE RISE OF THE GRIEF MEMOIR

If, as Berman proposes, A Grief Observed, published in 1961, is the text

"[G]rief and mourning are experienced and marked in space, as we

MEMORIAL POTENCY OF PLACE

Whereas Maddrell and Sidaway offer a pointed critique of valorizing the

MOURNING AND REMEMBERING

As it registers the shifting pattern of the mourner's emotional reactions

THE VORTEX EFFECT

daughter's hospital room's unusual "rose-patterned wallpaper border, a Doro

Such determined evasions "require ingenuity" on Didion's part, but they en

The house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Grief memoirs, Jeffrey Berman argues, "dramatize both personal and cu

These numbers, as Martin-Matthews points out, should be understood in the context of

Administration on Aging. "Older Women." Washington, DC: US Department of

Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenoloçical Study. 2nd ed. Bloomineton: Indiana

Hagman, George. "Beyond Decathexis: Toward a New Psychoanalytic Understanding and

ert A. Neimeyer. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001. 13-31.

"Memory, Mourning and Landscape in the Scottish Mountains: Discourses of

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