Joan Didion On Going Home Analysis

In the essay, On Going Home, Joan Didion claims, “the question of whether or not you could go home again was a very real part of the sentimental and largely literary baggage with which we left home in the fifties; I suspect that it irrelevant to the children born of the fragmentation after World War II.” Joan Didion defines something that changes as you get older, but her claim is saying that those born after the war, do not know what home is. The state of the country after the war is written to seem as an era of prosperity, with the baby boom and the spread to the suburbs. The reality of this being, the country was in utter chaos, the economy was recovering from one war while prepping for future wars. Amidst the ruin, we as a people lost our sense of home, and the only honest recollections are in books. Joan Didion establishes this claim in order to highlight the efforts made by her generation to enstill a home, and the progressive stray from home in the subsequent generations.

Jordan Elbridge is the place where both his parents had spent their whole lives and he would do the same. This town was and is similar the home we see prior to the 1950s. My grandmother and grandfather established such a life where there was no worry as to if you could return home. Their logic was if you never leave, then you do not have to worry about if you can return or not. The attempts of my grandparents have influenced my uncles. For they eliminated those questions too, they also stayed in the same town. My father, however, must face the question anytime he has returned to his old home town. He has decided that he cannot return home, because that is not what it is for him any longer. He avoids returning due to the uncomforting awareness he has that life has moved on without