Memories of Home

Memories of Home

        “Home is where the heart is,” but can home ever be the same once you have left the nest?  According to Joan Didion, in her short story entitled “On Going Home”, home will never be the same once you have left and secured another. I remember being a teenager full of angst. I couldn’t wait to leave the confining clutches of my parents’ hands. When we reach middle-age and find ourselves reminiscing about the past, we often find that those days were the best of our lives. “On Going Home,” takes us on a journey to a place many of us have gone before.  The time and place that we realize that what used to be familiar and comfortable in our past has changed and so have we.  

        Didion struggles with the strong values she learned as a child and seems concerned that her current lifestyle has pulled her away from her family and her childhood home. She yearns for her life in Los Angeles, specifically her marriage, to be more like her childhood family life. Her husband does not like how she behaves when they are visiting her family, because he doesn’t understand the family traditions.  Her husband appears to have been raised in a totally different environment, and doesn’t appreciate it when his wife reverts to her country ways. Didion writes, “My husband likes my family but is uneasy in their house, because once there I fall in their ways, which are difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate, not my husband’s ways”(139).  Because of his inability to understand these ways, her husband would not visit her family that often. The cherished mementos, dusty surfaces, and the inane discussions about mental hospitals and drunks, left him feeling uneasy.

        The obvious tension between Didion and her husband leaves me wondering what kind of marriage they shared.  After all, when you love someone you accept them for who they are and where they came from. You may not identify with their family, but you embrace their family and accept their ways.  The couple leaves me with the impression that they are distant from each other. Not only does her husband feel uncomfortable around her at her family home, but doesn’t seem to acknowledge her feelings on a personal level. Didion writes, “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 asks what I have been doing, suggests uneasily that I get out, drive to San Francisco or Berkeley”(141). Their marriage has become the mirror image of the relationship she shares with her family.   Her husband and her talk, but do not communicate; just as it is with her cousins and other dysfunctional family members.

        Didion longs to give her daughter the same childhood experiences that she remembers. Unfortunately, as Didion tries to recapture her youth, she comes to the realization that everything has changed, including her.  In her final words of wisdom, Didion addresses her thoughts regarding her daughter, “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 to give her a “home” for her birthday, but we live differently now, and I can promise nothing like that"(142). She has come to terms with her new life in the present and accepts the fact that the past and present cannot be merged. The past that she knew must remain in her memories.