On Going Home by Joan Didion
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Home is a place where most experience ultimate comfort, security, and emotional ties. As reading Joan Didion’s “On Going Home” you can feel the tone and passion she has towards home, especially proven when she states, “Days pass. I see no one. I come to dread my husband’s evening call, not only because he is full of news of what by now seems to me our remote life in Los Angeles, people he has seen, letters which require attention, but because he ask what I have been doing, suggests uneasily that I get out and drive away, instead I drive across the river to a family graveyard.”(141) She’s completely content on being satisfied by home with its simple ways and family surroundings.
That’s why going home to Joan is the ultimate comfort, security, and emotional relief; because she’s with family. Family will always judge and be protecting, especially towards female relatives. When Joan states, “Marriage is the classic betrayal,” (140) and that her brother only knows her husband as “Joan’s husband” it is the perfect example of showing unacceptance from betrayal of Joan marrying and switching names to adopt another family whom she would’ve never met for it weren’t for her husband. It makes Joan’s family seem jealous almost, that she’s found significant others to share the same passion of being “family” with and the betrayal feeling arises because that’s how close Joan and her family are. They accept her husband, but the he doesn’t feel too comfortable in the family household, according to Joan. She states that ,”My husband likes my family but is uneasy in their house, because once there I fall into their ways, which are difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate, not my husband’s ways” (139).
