Joan Didion On Going Home

An attachment is developed when someone uses or spends considerable time with a person or object. 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 and a result of her not spending as much time at her childhood home as she once did; both of these make her feel detached from her home in Central Valley. Detachment as it is applied to Didion’s situation …show more content…
Didion makes it obvious throughout the opening paragraph of the essay that she has a strong relationship with her husband, her family accepts and likes her husband, and that her husband accepts and likes her family; but the acceptance of everyone in the family does not overshadow the apparent differences in their cultures growing up. Didion’s husband seemed to have more of a traditional childhood and consequently cannot relate to Didion and her family’s ways. Didion’s husband’s inability to fully gel with Didion’s family is the main reason for Didion’s confliction on where her true “home” is. Didion is very attached to her family and her home in the Central Valley of California, which is seen from her visits to the family graveyard and her visits to her great-aunt where she tries her best to appease everyone, but from her tone in the rest of the essay, it also becomes apparent that feels more detached from. Didion feels like she is “[carrying] the burden of home,” which causes her “to find family life the cause of all tension and drama,” which can be seen in her opening paragraph, where she blames the mild discord between her family and her husband on the differences in the frequent familial conversations (Didion …show more content…
While not explicitly acknowledging that her feelings of detachment from her home are a problem, she suggests it when she decides to meet her neurotic lassitude head on in an attempt to find a “final solution,” by going through her old drawers (Didion 185). Eventually, Didion concedes defeat and says that there is not a final solution to any of the memories that were sparked in her by the items in her drawer, which symbolically states that she does not have a solution to solve the detachment she feels from her childhood