In Joan Didion’s On Going Home the author reveals the troublesome distinction between her home in Los Angeles with her husband and their baby live, and the sense of her real home, where her family lives in Central Valley California. The polar differences between her husband (symbolizing her new life) and her nuclear family (old life) create a strong conflict in her life. Salt is rubbed in the wound when she realizes that the more she is around her old family, the more she acts like them, the way her husband dislikes. ‘Home is where the heart is’. That is a common phrase used yet presents a paradox for Joan. Everything that she once knew in her old hometown has changed. Nothing is as she had left it, physically, and in her mind. Degradation had happened and she was at a loss. Although her meanings were implicitly stated in the text, the reader can feel her sense of meaninglessness with the loss of home, family, and ID all through the use of her images. Take for example the passage about the broken monuments. Something that is representing someone once living and it is there to symbolize their life and “the monuments are broken, overturned in the dry grass”.
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