Analysis Of Joan Didion's On Going Home

Accepting one’s past is the most important step in accepting one’s future. In Joan Didion’s “On Going Home,” the reader can see that Didion is struggling to find her true “home” and the root of her difficulties could stem from her feeling of continual detachment from her childhood home because she moved away and began to reside in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. Didion faces problems in trying to understand where her true “home” is, which is the result of her husband not being fully incorporated in her family; both of these make her feel detached from her childhood home. By analyzing Didion’s tone and writing style in her essay and comparing it to the tone and writing style of Margaret Laurence’s “Where the World Began,” which also addresses themes regarding one’s childhood home, Didion’s feelings of detachment can be observed. Didion begins her
Her constant uses of sad, melancholy, and somber words show that even though she has a strong attachment and love for her childhood home, as she continues to grow up, this love and attachment changes to confusion and detachment. Joan Didion’s feelings are more evident when her essay is compared to Margaret Laurence’s essay “Where the World Began,” which is another essay dealing with the author’s reflection on her childhood home. Laurence’s tone is completely different from Didion’s, and Laurence continually talks about her love for her childhood home regardless of whether she is talking about the prairies where she grew up, the oddities of her hometown, or of her personal opinion of Canada as a whole. While Joan Didion never explicitly states that she feels detached from her childhood home the longer she lives away from it, the tone used in her essay in comparison to Laurence’s essay suggest that there is a strong