Joan Didion on going home

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“On Going Home” by John Didion
Question 1.
In “On Going Home”, Didion is exploring her belonging with her two homes by recounting her feelings when she visits her native land to celebrate the first birthday of her daughter. In this exploration, one home is where she grew up with her parents and premarital family while the other one is where she lives after her marriage along with her husband and daughter. The essay “express… experience and a feeling that is ultimately inexpressible” about her inner conflict while comparing and contrasting her life in these two homes (Anderson 14). Though she is content in her new home but the sense of belonging she feels while recalling the experiences of her premarital life in her previous home is nonexistent in her new home.
Question 2.
In this expression, the most important term is ‘guerilla war’, in which it is difficult to tell that who is on which side since the borders between friends and enemies are frequently shifting. For Didion, guerilla war is analogous to a woman’s life after marriage with respect to the conflict between her new and her previous homes. She views herself and her mother as veterans of this guerrilla war yet she insists that they never comprehended this war. In this way, she implies that fighting with the inner conflict of comparing and contrasting previous and new homes is natural in women and they fight this war unconsciously without any purpose.
Question 3.

The essay proposes that Didion strongly believes in the existence of an unbreakable love bond between people and the home where they grow up. Hence, for her, marriage is a classic betrayal in consequence of which one leaves the place with which the love bond is by all accounts unbreakable. The power of this bond is most likely a source of tension between her family and her husband since he feels uneasy at her home owing to her “difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate” ways (Didion 217). These ways are strikingly different from the ways of her husband’s home and family hence the tension between them and their family is inevitable.
Question 4.
For Didion, her home is not the place where she lives at present together with her husband and daughter, but the home in “Central Valley of California” where she used to live before her marriage (Didion 217). Even though she is living a happy life after marriage yet even at the age of thirty, whenever she talks to her family she cries after hanging up the phone. She comes to visit her home to celebrate the first birthday of her daughter and recollecting old memories makes her wish to give such home to her daughter as a birthday gift. However, she feels that the worth of home has been changed for the new generation in the new society.
Question 5.
I do believe that the force that changes a house into a home is an array of memories a person makes while living at a certain place. After moving to a new place from a place where one has spent a considerable amount of time, depression and nostalgia are natural because of the memories one is leaving behind. However, after living a considerable amount in a new place one starts developing new memories and starts feeling a sense of belonging to that place as well.
Works Cited
Anderson, Chris. “Teaching students what not to say: Iser, Didion, and the rhetoric of gaps.” Journal of Advanced Composition, 1987, 10-22.
Didion, Joan. “On Going Home”. Of Women and the Essay: An Anthology from 1655 to 2000. Ed. Jenny Spinner, University of Georgia Press, 2018. 216-219.