“A Place None of Us Know Until We Reach It”: Mapping Grief and Memory in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking

Given its by now canonical status as the exemplary grief memoir, I read The Year of Magical Thinking as a narrative that illuminates the spatiality of mourning, or the ways in which the newly bereaved experience specific locations over time. Two currently important theoretical strands within bereavement studies—the spatial turn and memory/memorialization—inform my analysis. I argue that Didion’s evolving experience of the vortex effect, as she refers to a place’s ability to set forward a series of memorial associations, as well as her reliance on spatial imagery to convey the sense of loss, shows that grief does not only unfold over time but also across space.