Joan Didion's On Going Home

The piece, “On Going Home” by Joan Didion, is about what Didion’s meaning of home is. The writing begins with Didion going home to visit family she had not seen in quite a long time. Didion clarified in the first paragraph what home meant to her. She explained, “By “home” I do not mean the house in Los Angeles where my husband and I and the baby live, but the place where my family is…” Throughout the writing Didion gives the reader insight into her family near and far and what she wants for her child.

This piece starts its structure with an intro comparing and contrasting her past and present life as she arrives at home for her daughter’s first birthday. Following the intro is the body of her writing which describes the experiences she encountered while visiting her family. Lastly, Didion concludes with the realization that the life she would like her daughter to experience would, in the end, not to be possible. In the last paragraph of the reading Didion states, “I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like …show more content…
The use of the phrase, “Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one’s past at every turn…” is one example. Another would be, “ambushes of family life.” She includes syntax by adding simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, fragmented/parallel sentences, and compound-complex sentences. A great amount of vivid imagery was also used throughout the piece. One example includes Didion describing a scene, “the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in.” Didion was very precise and technical in this piece of