According to the short essay “On Going Home” by Joan Didion, you can never go back home once you’ve acquired another. Didion explains generation gaps during the rocky path towards self-realization and acceptance while attending what we call life. She explains that there is a certain time in which people find themselves in what is described as a mid-life crisis- the realization that what was a familiar and comfortable past is now not the present. As teenagers we wait anxiously for the day we once and for all move out and be free to explore the world from a new mindset. However, in Didion's essay we see that there is a possibility of a new reality of what lies ahead once we step out of the house we grew up in. Her life now consists of dealing with her marriage, raising her daughter, and living in Los Angeles; Didion's persona throughout the essay is that she is often triggered by past experiences that lead her into a lingering sensation of nostalgia and uneasiness but yet hope and acceptance as well.

Didion is obviously conflicted with the strong values she holds towards her childhood family life and new family life in LA, wishing to unite them in her marriage. Her husband is troubled to be with her family in this "home" on account of her turning into a different person around her family. It becomes apparent her husband was raised conflictingly and doesn't appreciate it when his wife falls victim to the ways of her family, ". . .which are difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate" (1). He would stay away from the house as much as he could, but when he had to go there he felt very uneasy. Uneasy because of the mementos scattered through the house that he did not understand, the dust that lay on surfaces, and the conversations about mental hospitals and drunks he had no interest in discussing.

This tension makes one wonder, what kind of marriage do they have?