On Going Home Joan Didion Analysis

Home is My Life Burden
Home. An alternative life kept from the outside world. Behind closed doors, it can be filled with tension but others may see happiness. Life outside my home is my escape from the anxiety that’s built from within the walls of what is called my home. But now, it’s not fully a family with just me and my mother. We’re all separated, living different lives, but we’re good and stable. Others just know the outcome of how my family is right now while a few know the whole story. My home has so many memories I don’t want to remember, but it has shaped who I am today, especially being separated from my little brother and the events leading up to it.
In Joan Didion, “On Going Home”, the author talks about how difficult it is going back home to her family in the Central Valley of California and how uneasy it gets going back. The life she has between her child and husband is different than the one with her mother, father and brother. She says her husband doesn’t understand anything that goes on in her family. For example, she says “Nor does he understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking about the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers rising and falling and the mountain roads closing when the heavy snow comes in.” (Didion 2) So

A better one than she had in fact, but she can only give her so much since they live differently now. Didion says “She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life” (Didion 3) Meaning that she’s not ready for what is there to come with a “home.” I personally disagree because I don’t want my children going through what I went through especially at a young age when it happened. The experience is still hard for me to cope with and the fact that I’m an only child in the