On Going Home Essay

Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to. In Joan Didion’s essay “On Going Home”, Didion shows how disconnected she feels from her family on a visit back home for her daughter’s birthday through varied syntax and imagery. Growing up, becoming independent from your family, and starting a family of your own can lead to you growing apart from your family. Although Didion’s husband tolerates her family, he doesn’t fully accept them which causes the conflict of him never truly being accepted by Didion’s family, which can be seen by her brother referring to him as “Joan’s husband”, as if he simply sees him as an unnecessary extension of Didion. She refers to marriage as the “classic betrayal” showing that she feels she has betrayed her family by creating one of her own. Through imagery “yellow fields and the cottonwoods and rivers rising and falling”, Didion shows how her husband fails to fully understand her family which is why they never fully accept him. Visiting her family causes memories of the past to rush through Didion in a wave of nostalgia; however, she feels she is no longer playing much of a role in her home because she has spent too much time away. As she clears out a drawer she finds a “letter of rejection from The Nation” which symbolizes the feeling of rejection she feels from her family. Although the don’t explicitly reject her, when she goes to visit her great-aunts “a few of them think [she is her] cousin, or their daughter who died young”, mistaking her for someone else. This confusion has made Didion feel like she has spent so much time away that she has been forgotten and even metaphorically “dead” like the great-aunts whose daughters have literally died. Didion displays the disconnected feeling she has from her family through asyndetons “around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly”. Through this quote Didion shows how she no longer has an aim when walking through the house. Clearly at