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Going Home
From Danielle Steel, one of the world’s bestselling authors, comes a special reissue of her very first novel, in which a woman is forced to flee her past and come to terms with the truth.
In the sun swept beauty of San Francisco, Gillian Forrester is filled with the joy of a love that will surely last. But a painful betrayal forces her to flee to New York and begin a new life. There she discovers an exciting new career and a deep, enveloping passion…only to have her newfound happiness shaken to its core. Now Gillian must choose between her future and her past, and find in the deepest desires of her heart the one way, the only way of Going Home.
Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition with this ISBN here.
In the sun swept beauty of San Francisco, Gillian Forrester is filled with the joy of a love that will surely last. But a painful betrayal forces her to flee to New York and begin a new life. There she discovers an exciting new career and a deep, enveloping passion…only to have her newfound happiness shaken to its core. Now Gillian must choose between her future and her past, and find in the deepest desires of her heart the one way, the only way of Going Home.
Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition with this ISBN here.
400 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
317 people are currently reading
2325 people want to read
About the author
Danielle Steel
911 books16.7k followersDanielle Steel has been hailed as one of the world's bestselling authors, with almost a billion copies of her novels sold. Her many international bestsellers include All That Glitters, Royal, Daddy's Girls, The Wedding Dress, The Numbers Game, Moral Compass, Spy, and other highly acclaimed novels. She is also the author of His Bright Light, the story of her son Nick Traina's life and death; A Gift of Hope, a memoir of her work with the homeless; Expect a Miracle, a book of her favorite quotations for inspiration and comfort; Pure Joy, about the dogs she and her family have loved; and the children's books Pretty Minnie in Paris and Pretty Minnie in Hollywood.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 227 reviews
November 28, 2016
Prvi roman Danijele Stil i jedan od mojih 20 prevoda njenih romana... Te godine kad je objavljen ovaj prevod imala sam zadovoljstvo i čast da uđem u autorkinu kuću... Nažalost, budući da je moja poseta pala 3 meseca posle samoubistva njenog sina nisam mogla da dobijem od nje intervju za RTS... Ali sam videla kako izgleda mašinerija iza njenih knjiga... Ljude koji za nju obavljaju istraživanja... a možda i pišu čitave knjige... :) A lični asistent joj je bio u to vreme veoma zgodan mladić, kao sa reklama... ali kao i većina populacije San Franciska, duginih boja... :)
Ovaj prevod trebalo je ove godine da ima novo izdanje, ali... neće ga biti...
Ovaj prevod trebalo je ove godine da ima novo izdanje, ali... neće ga biti...
November 17, 2011
One of the other reviews described this book as a car wreck. I wholeheartedly agree. It was a book that was difficult to get through, yet at the same time I didn't want to put it down.
I absolutely hated the main character, Gillian. She spent the book in love with a man who had no redeeming qualities except that he was attractive and "made her happy," yet there was no rationalization as to why he made her so happy, unless being treated like garbage is a turn on for some women.
The whole time I felt compelled to reach into the book and shake the woman.
While I hated the main character, I did enjoy the interjection of side plots based on her friends, and was pleased that even if Gillian couldn't see a good man in front of her that her friend could.
I absolutely hated the main character, Gillian. She spent the book in love with a man who had no redeeming qualities except that he was attractive and "made her happy," yet there was no rationalization as to why he made her so happy, unless being treated like garbage is a turn on for some women.
The whole time I felt compelled to reach into the book and shake the woman.
While I hated the main character, I did enjoy the interjection of side plots based on her friends, and was pleased that even if Gillian couldn't see a good man in front of her that her friend could.
October 11, 2015
”Every woman falls in love with a bastard at least once in her life.”- Danielle Steel
Setting:New York City and San Francisco; 1973
Cover Thoughts?:Well, my book didn’t have a dust jacket, so all I got was a plain boring hardback book. But from this cover, it looks like a house I’d want to live in. Although, really, the MC never lives in an actual house that looks anywhere near like this.
Plot:
”They stood around us, and watched us go, hand in hand, going home.”In the sunswept beauty of San Francisco, Gillian Forrester is filled with the joy of a love that will surely last. But a painful betrayal forces her to flee to New York and a new life. There she discovers an exciting new career and a deep, enveloping passion--only to have her newfound happiness shaken to its core. Now Gillian must choose between her future and her past, to find in the deepest desires of her heart the one way, the only way, of going home.
My mom loves to read. However, she’ll only read mysteries and thrillers; everything else is off the table. But there was once a magical time where she occasionally read a romance novel (I should know; I found some of her super old copies a while back). One of those said authors was Danielle Steel, aka the queen of romance novels. She stopped reading her after her novels became “too predictable” so to speak. This didn’t stop fifteen-year-old me from wondering in fascination how good Ms. Steel’s books must have been in order for my mom to even TOUCH them, let alone read them. So as a precocious teenage bookworm would do, I tracked down her books and read some. This was one of them.
Have you ever read a book back when you were younger and remember loving it, and when you’re older you want to dive into it again seeing if you have the same feelings? Well, that’s what poor little old me did with this book. I want every single hour, minute, and second back that I spent reading this cesspool of a book. It was literally atrocious. I couldn’t find one single redeemable quality about it; I don’t even know how the hell this even got published. The plot basically revolved around the wettest of wet noodles out there (Gillian Forrester) as she proceeds to fall madly in love with the most arrogant, self-absorbent of assholes (Chris Matthews). The quote that starts out this review is Danielle Steel’s concept for writing this book; she took this concept and not only ran with it, she ran with it while yelling the whole way, “I do what I want!” The stupidity of the characters and their actions was cringe- inducing, not to mention their immaturity.
Characters:
”’Do you want to know why the men in your life have treated you badly? Because you want them to. You wouldn’t know what to do with them it they didn’t. You eat it up. ”That above quote was spoken by one of the only mature characters in this book Gordon. Unfortunately, I wasn’t supposed to agree with him about Gillian by any means, but I found myself doing just that. Gillian Forrester is a new divorcee with a five year old daughter Samantha who moves from New York to San Francisco for a fresh start. Samantha was nothing more than a side character obsessed with cowboys and a penchant for saying “Uncle Crits”. Gillian, on the other hand, was just about the most infuriating female character I ever read about. Immature, irresponsible, needy, clingy, and seemingly incapable of picking the right man, she was a nightmare to read about.
”’Responsibility. I’m allergic to it.’”Chris Matthews is nothing more than a man-child. He shirks responsibility, and I’m pretty sure the only reason for his existence is to make me lost my ever-loving mind with his horrific decisions (and the way he treats Gillian). For instance, when she tells him she’s knocked up with his child, what does he do? Does he offer his unconditional love and support and assurances that he’ll do everything in his power to love and care for her and their unborn child? NO. Do you wanna know what he does?
HE MAKES HER AND SAM MOVE BACK TO NEW YORK SO HE CAN HAVE SOME SPACE. AND SHE DOES IT.
WHAT KIND OF ASSHOLE DOES THIS? He does a whole lot of other crappy things to, like cheat on Gillian right and left, but THAT right there was probably the stupidest thing he ever did throughout the entirety of the novel.
Pros:NONE. LITERALLY NONE.
Cons:Where do I even start? I could talk about the horrendous (or maybe hilarious?) use of metaphors in this book….
”Chris turned his head to look at me as I opened the door, and the only thing that struck me was that his face was as expressionless as his buttocks which stared at me from the bed.”. Or I could talk about the immaturity of Gillian, whom despite the advice of all of her friends… -
”’I’m sure Chris is a charming boy, but I don’t think he’s for you. Frankly, I think you deserve better. And you need the kind of things Chris will never be able to give you.”seems to give no regard to the safety and welfare of her child as she embarks on this selfish laden romance with Chris, with the age old whiny excuse of BUT I WUV HIM!! IT’S TRUE WUV!! CAN’T YOU HEAR THE BIRDS CHIRPING THEIR APPROVAL?
”He did some brutal things to my heart in those last weeks, but somehow I loved him anyway. He was Chris. And he was made that way, and you could never blame him for anything.”Even better, I could talk about what an absolute, complete, utter asshole Chris Matthews was.
”’Bullshit. We’ve been plenty happy. And the fact is if you’d come home when you said you were going to you’d have found me and Sam eating dinner in the kitchen, and nothing would have changed. You wouldn’t have known. And if you really cared about me, you’d understand, and nothing would be changed now that you do know…’”OH, YEAH, SURE, IT’S ALL HER FAULT. IF SHE HAD JUST COME IN A FEW MINUTES LATER, EVERYTHING WOULD’VE BEEN FINE. YOU’D STILL BE A DICKHEAD, BUT IT’D BE FINE. I CAN TOTALLY SEE THE MASOCHIST LOGIC BEHIND ALL OF THIS.
Love Triangle?:Yeah; Chris vs. Gillian vs. Gordon.
”It was better with Gordon than it had ever been with Chris, which seemed odd to me because I didn’t love Gordon.”Don’t even worry about Gordon; he shows up for a blip , disappears, and then comes back for the grand finale.
Instalove?:Yup; all you have to do is read the quote below and you’ll see why. Even better; that quote was taken from page 14. Yes, you heard that right. 14.
A Little Romance?:
”’Quit kissing me or I’ll make love you to you right here on the open beach.’
‘Don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep.’ I was teasing and he knew it, but he grabbed me by the arm, spun me around, and the next thing I knew we were lying on the beach making love again.”
I wish I could say that Gillian and Chris had a loving, committed relationship defined by love, honor, responsibility and maturity. Unfortunately, their relationship was based mostly on how great the sex was.
Conclusion:
Stiles doesn’t even begin to sum up how little this book impressed me, since it had absolutely zero positive aspects about it. I usually try to point out at least one positive aspect of a book, but in this case, I simply can’t do that. This book was atrocious. Just take this as a big PSA from me (and Stiles) and stay away from this book. Focus on some of her other earlier works (i.e. Wanderlust and The Ring).
August 6, 2020
So much to love and so much to laugh about in Danielle Steel's heartbreaking, uplifting first novel. There are moments so real they take your breath away -- like when the young heroine gets her first look at the beauty of San Francisco. And there are moments full of unintended humor that really make you laugh -- Danielle Steel describing the "happening" Sixties party scene. Imagine Jacqueline Onassis trying to groove to the psychedelic sounds of Jimi Hendrix!
There are two men in this book, and both of them seem like laughable cliches at first. The spoiled golden-boy hippie who balls every chick in site. The classy art lover with the goatee. (I pictured him as Dr. Carrington from THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD.) The strange thing is by the time the book is over you can actually understand why Gillian loves both men -- and how she grows as a person even when (especially when) they let her down. Of course their are the two "best friends" who come through for Gillian as well. There's Peg, the super cliche, the tough-talking type. And there's Hilary, the super-civilized, Miranda Priestley type. I loved both of them.
Everything wrong with this book is right on the surface -- a hippy dude who calls his woman "ma'am" or "little lady?" A hippy dude who seduces a woman by squirting her with a water pistol? A cultivated young woman who "digs" the "scene" but has apparently never heard of Civil Rights, Vietnam? Falls in love with San Francisco but never heard of Haight-Ashbury or Altamont?
So much of that surface stuff is bad, even laughable. But Gillian is always real. The way she can be breathless with excitement about San Francisco and still love the polish of the old world. The way she can be swept away by free love and still long for a church wedding. The way she can be the best mother imaginable and still be appalled by her daughter's deep love for earthworms. The writing is often lousy, but the humanity shines through on every page.
There's a reason why Danielle Steel has been on top of the heap for almost fifty years!
There are two men in this book, and both of them seem like laughable cliches at first. The spoiled golden-boy hippie who balls every chick in site. The classy art lover with the goatee. (I pictured him as Dr. Carrington from THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD.) The strange thing is by the time the book is over you can actually understand why Gillian loves both men -- and how she grows as a person even when (especially when) they let her down. Of course their are the two "best friends" who come through for Gillian as well. There's Peg, the super cliche, the tough-talking type. And there's Hilary, the super-civilized, Miranda Priestley type. I loved both of them.
Everything wrong with this book is right on the surface -- a hippy dude who calls his woman "ma'am" or "little lady?" A hippy dude who seduces a woman by squirting her with a water pistol? A cultivated young woman who "digs" the "scene" but has apparently never heard of Civil Rights, Vietnam? Falls in love with San Francisco but never heard of Haight-Ashbury or Altamont?
So much of that surface stuff is bad, even laughable. But Gillian is always real. The way she can be breathless with excitement about San Francisco and still love the polish of the old world. The way she can be swept away by free love and still long for a church wedding. The way she can be the best mother imaginable and still be appalled by her daughter's deep love for earthworms. The writing is often lousy, but the humanity shines through on every page.
There's a reason why Danielle Steel has been on top of the heap for almost fifty years!
September 7, 2011
It was like a bad car wreck. You couldn't look away... or in this case put the damn book down. It was full of emotional abuse, which I'm surprised didn't take on the form of physical at times. Of course Gillian chose the wrong man. That's all she ever has chosen. Near the end I was for sure Chris was trying to get out of marring the pregnant Gillian but he really was dead. But life went on for Gillian. Wish I could get some time back from reading this... but like I said for some odd reason I wanted to see what happened. Not because I liked it, but to see if this woman whould come to her senses.
July 4, 2014
I don’t even know where to start with this book.
I have never been so angry while reading before. The characters were either annoying or just mean and hateful. The storyline is all over the place and sometimes you find yourself lost and don’t even know what is happening. This isn't one that I want to read again. When I first picked this up I really wanted to love it, but I just ended up angry and wanted to give up reading it altogether.
I'm not one that hates anything I read. I really thought I would enjoy this book, and my mom recommended Danielle Steel. I have one of her other books so I will try that one. Despite my feelings towards this book I will give her other one a try.
I have never been so angry while reading before. The characters were either annoying or just mean and hateful. The storyline is all over the place and sometimes you find yourself lost and don’t even know what is happening. This isn't one that I want to read again. When I first picked this up I really wanted to love it, but I just ended up angry and wanted to give up reading it altogether.
I'm not one that hates anything I read. I really thought I would enjoy this book, and my mom recommended Danielle Steel. I have one of her other books so I will try that one. Despite my feelings towards this book I will give her other one a try.
April 2, 2019
I first read this in high school. Back then, I thought it was amazing. I was young and naive. Well, I recently decided to read it again and honestly, I can't believe I adored it the way I did. I found myself annoyed with the main character more than anything.
I give it to Steel. She is amazing with words. She knows how to make you not want to put her books down. She knows how to make you laugh and cry. But this book doesn't justify Steel's abilities one bit. I would really like to read one of her more recent novels just to compare. I hope I don't end up feeling the same way.
Overall, this is a quick read. I may not have been too thrilled at the plot, but I couldn't put it down and it took me just two days to read the whole thing. I suppose it would be a great beach read, or a book to bring on a long trip or weekend getaway. But I didn't take away any strong/positive feelings from it.
I give it to Steel. She is amazing with words. She knows how to make you not want to put her books down. She knows how to make you laugh and cry. But this book doesn't justify Steel's abilities one bit. I would really like to read one of her more recent novels just to compare. I hope I don't end up feeling the same way.
Overall, this is a quick read. I may not have been too thrilled at the plot, but I couldn't put it down and it took me just two days to read the whole thing. I suppose it would be a great beach read, or a book to bring on a long trip or weekend getaway. But I didn't take away any strong/positive feelings from it.
July 28, 2024
Where did I get this book from? And why did I read the entire thing 🤣. Read at your own risk. It’s definitely dated and the main character is shoddy but quick and easy read
Edit-did not realize this was Ms Steele’s first novel. Props to the beginning of an era.
Edit-did not realize this was Ms Steele’s first novel. Props to the beginning of an era.
September 5, 2018
I am on page 100 and I don't know if I can take it any more. I literally want to gouge my eyes out, its so bad that it was funny at some points "His face was as expressionless as his bare ass" or upon viewing a hippie orgy, "I just didn't DIG that scene" (sooo 70s), but that humor wore off. I skipped to the end to save myself. Good god. It was literal GARBAGE. Gillian is so immature, red flags galore and she ignored it. Joe told her that hes a player and a c*nt. He flat out said "I can't take responsibility, Im allergic to it" You're in your 30s, grow up man. Upon being caught gettin' freaky with a girl , he pulls the "I'm a man, I have needs to f*ck around" card. Gillian doesn't really have much self worth, she keeps coming back to damn Chris. "He did some brutal things to my heart in those last weeks, but somehow I loved him anyway. He was Chris. And he was made that way, and you could never blame him for anything.” GIVE ME A BREAK. Just because he is funny sometimes and you have sex with him doesn't mean you ignore hiss cheating, meanness, lying, etc. When she's pregnant, he's all "Wow I love you so much but I need space because i'm allergic to responsibility, please uproot you and your daughter again :-)" And She MARRIES HIM??? I was so glad he died. I'm surprised Danielle Steel had a successful career if this was what she came into the romance novel scene with. This was so bad it's really beyond words. BYE! WHY DID I BUY THIS TRASH.
July 17, 2012
The first book by Steel I've ever read. The feelings are ambiguous. The book seemed to be total trash in the beginning. The main protagonist Gillian pissed me off, I must admit, mainly because of her strange attitude to love and relations between men and women. I was perplexed and puzzled at how she kept forgiving that badass Chris who was cheating on her continuously. There were other men around who could make her happy and she kept dragging behind that Chrissy-boy and ruining her life to pieces.
Nevertheless, giving the subject second thought, I realized that it's unfair to judge her that way. So many women fall for bastards rejecting good guys and can't do a thing about it. That's in our nature..
On the other hand, the book has many good points. I loved the description of New York, it totally coincides with my understanding of this fantastic city! Thumbs Up!
The thing most precious in this book is the end, that is the last 20-30 pages. The ending is absolutely wonderful, vivid and sentimental. Made me cry once. The end is strong, maybe too strong for such a mediocre book.
Nevertheless, giving the subject second thought, I realized that it's unfair to judge her that way. So many women fall for bastards rejecting good guys and can't do a thing about it. That's in our nature..
On the other hand, the book has many good points. I loved the description of New York, it totally coincides with my understanding of this fantastic city! Thumbs Up!
The thing most precious in this book is the end, that is the last 20-30 pages. The ending is absolutely wonderful, vivid and sentimental. Made me cry once. The end is strong, maybe too strong for such a mediocre book.
August 17, 2021
I chose this book because my maw maw read every one of her books until the dementia set in. I felt all emotions throughout this book! It was a Rollercoaster experience!
I could feel my grandma looking over my shoulder laughing at me thinking how could she read about sex!!! Lol
I could feel my grandma looking over my shoulder laughing at me thinking how could she read about sex!!! Lol
February 17, 2015
I read this for genre discussion at work. What a steaming pile of shit. Good riddance.
May 10, 2015
I have two words - BULL POOPIE
January 23, 2018
This is the book that started it all. Steel created a character who was maddeningly obtuse, falling into a relationship with a man who obviously was not good for her and only cared about himself. With the choice between two men, one who truly cares for and for which they have much in common and the egomaniac, Steel takes matters into her own hands and reduces the choice to one, the correct one. Would Gillian have made the right decision on her own? I doubt it.
December 2, 2007
this is the one an only book i ever purposely stole from the library.
it's that good.
especially when you're 12.
couldn't find the right cover art though. Dammit!
it's that good.
especially when you're 12.
couldn't find the right cover art though. Dammit!
August 13, 2023
The overall story was great, although I didnt like the relationship between Gillian and Chris especially as she seemed to be blind to how he was treating her and forgave him too easily - that being said I felt bad for him with his ending but happy for Gillian with hers
The flow of this book was not great it wasnt really there it felt every chapter we'd jumped a bit further ahead which is fine at times but felt like I was missing something
The flow of this book was not great it wasnt really there it felt every chapter we'd jumped a bit further ahead which is fine at times but felt like I was missing something
January 5, 2025
I tried two chapters, as it's a goal to work my way through Danielle Steel's backlog this year, and I dnf'd after the first two chapters. The writing was painful, the characters meh and I was thoroughly bored. I'm really hoping her books improve because I have at least a quarter of them! 1.5 ⭐
June 12, 2018
I had mixed emotions about this book. Overall, it was a fairly good book, especially the last half or so, it got much better towards the end, I thought. There were certain things throughout the book that were problematic to me, like for example, the main character, Gillian Forrester, becomes pregnant at a certain point, and Danielle Steel writes about her drinking and smoking during her pregnancy. Granted, this was D.S.'s very first novel, and was published in 1973, so I was trying to remember that drinking and smoking were not thought of as so bad for the baby back then. Also, in the first part of the book, it seemed kind of disjointed, the storyline at that point did not seem to flow together very well, and frankly, I wasn't really enjoying it too much. The book did get better as it went on, and it was actually quite good, except that towards the end, there was a lot of sadness, but overall, especially considering it was her first novel, not too bad, so that's why I gave it three stars. I AM glad I read it, as I can definitely see how D.S. improved her writing style through the years.
August 14, 2012
Funny enough, I had no interest in wanting to read this book. I simply found it in my mom's closet, grabbed it as a book to read commuting to work and bam! It was good! I didn't even realize I was reading a Danielle Steel book. Couldn't put it down for awhile honestly.
There are parts towards the end which do drag on ... Like really drag on, but the way it was written made it interesting and intriguing enough for me to read through it. I enjoyed this one. Mind you, I did want to slap the main character a few times for her horrible decisons. Then again, where's the fun if you can't get mad at fictional characters.
I'll no longer be just grabbing for a Danielle Steel book to pass time, I'll be looking for them.
There are parts towards the end which do drag on ... Like really drag on, but the way it was written made it interesting and intriguing enough for me to read through it. I enjoyed this one. Mind you, I did want to slap the main character a few times for her horrible decisons. Then again, where's the fun if you can't get mad at fictional characters.
I'll no longer be just grabbing for a Danielle Steel book to pass time, I'll be looking for them.
February 15, 2016
Seriously? That's what I thought on every other page of this book.
Since it was February I thought I would read a romance. Who better than the queen of romance herself? Danielle Steel! I hadn't read a book by her since I was 14 or 15. So I decided to start at the beginning with her first novel.
It was brutal! I wanted to shake the main character and I detested Chris. Like really detested him.
The best thing about the entire book was the last page.
Since it was February I thought I would read a romance. Who better than the queen of romance herself? Danielle Steel! I hadn't read a book by her since I was 14 or 15. So I decided to start at the beginning with her first novel.
It was brutal! I wanted to shake the main character and I detested Chris. Like really detested him.
The best thing about the entire book was the last page.
July 27, 2025
That's what the mothers are reading
Randomly picked this book from a bookshelf in Tenerife.
All I can say is that this book was WILD.
The main character tested my patience,
her wrong choices in men showed me that I better choose wisely.
spoiler + summary:
Toxic, narcissistic fiancé dies tragically so protagonist can return to her second choice aka her true love.
Randomly picked this book from a bookshelf in Tenerife.
All I can say is that this book was WILD.
The main character tested my patience,
her wrong choices in men showed me that I better choose wisely.
spoiler + summary:
Toxic, narcissistic fiancé dies tragically so protagonist can return to her second choice aka her true love.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 20, 2024
Es un libro que me ha encantado. Que emociona a cualquier persona que lo lea y que yo pienso que lo debe leer todo el mundo en algún momento. La escritora te tiene lleno de intriga durante toda la lectura.
November 22, 2008
Glad this wasn't the first Danielle Steel book I ever read...I would never have read another one.
December 4, 2019
I think I'm crying right now...
It's amazing, even though I don't usually like drama, this one got my heart.
Love, passion, eroticism, pain. Everything in perfect balance.
Loved it!!!!!
It's amazing, even though I don't usually like drama, this one got my heart.
Love, passion, eroticism, pain. Everything in perfect balance.
Loved it!!!!!
December 16, 2017
I read this back in the day when I read all the Danielle Steel I could get my hands on [some I even liked. Some I read because I knew they were "forbidden" books ;-) ]. I don't remember the exact date, but I do remember reading it.
May 28, 2024
Wow! You can really tell how old this book is. Smoking cigarettes! Drinking alcohol! All while being pregnant!! Not bad for DS first novel. Her typical Interesting characters and her abrupt ending.
October 29, 2025
This review was written in that dim corridor of days between the 22nd and 28th of October, 2025 — a week blurred by the hiss of oxygen and the slow drip of IV lines at Bellona Nursing Home & Diagnostic Centre Pvt. Ltd. I was then a reluctant guest of illness, recovering from an infection that had seized both lungs and kidneys. Forgive, therefore, the infrequent tremor in my language; it bears the soft delirium of painkillers and the fragile clarity of a mind half-dreaming between fever and thought.
When I think of Danielle Steel’s Going Home, I do not think of the plot first. I think of the texture of 1970s paperbacks, that faint yellowing of desire and despair, the kind of novel that waited for someone to take it seriously, even though it pretended it didn’t care. The book feels like a woman writing herself into existence before the world had learnt to listen properly.
And perhaps that’s where Barthes begins whispering—this is not a story about a woman returning home, but about language trying to reclaim the body that birthed it. The “home” in Steel’s title isn’t geographic; it’s semiotic. It’s the fragile place where the signified collapses into the signifier, and the woman—beautiful, wounded, necessary—tries to rebuild meaning from loss.
At the surface, Going Home is conventional: a young woman, Gillian Forrester, moves through heartbreak, ambition, and reconciliation, returning to the site of her beginnings. It’s a debut, still unpolished, with traces of commercial instinct fighting for space with real yearning. Yet beneath its melodrama is something raw, uncalculated—a pulse of uncertainty that makes it human.
Steel writes as though she is not yet Danielle Steel, the brand, but Danielle the witness. You can feel her hesitating at the edge of her own authority, asking if romantic suffering could ever be translated into narrative redemption. Kristeva would call it the chora, the pre-symbolic rhythm where emotion lives before it becomes syntax. That rhythm drives this book: sentences that repeat, ache, then suddenly find their footing again, as though Steel herself were learning to walk through love’s debris.
There’s something oddly liberating about how unguarded the prose is. It is not stylised. It does not aspire to literary approval. It simply is, like a diary that refuses to be ashamed of being sentimental. Reading it now, in 2025, feels like opening a time capsule from a pre-ironic age—before everything needed to be framed, detached, or clever.
Steel’s sincerity is her rebellion. In a culture that equates depth with darkness, she writes about light, persistence, and forgiveness. Derrida might have smirked at her faith in closure, in the notion that home can ever be found rather than perpetually deferred—but perhaps that’s her genius. She performs différance without realising it: every time Gillian seems to settle into comfort, something slips—a phone call, a memory, a whisper of old pain—and meaning dislocates again. Love, in Steel’s world, is not a noun but a chain of substitutions, always reaching toward what’s absent.
I remember reading Going Home during a particularly strange summer in my own life. Hospitals smelt like bleach and loneliness, and someone I cared about was far away. I found the book in a pile of discarded romances, the cover slightly torn, the pages soft from humidity. I expected it to be cliché, but the clichés were oddly reassuring—like hearing an old song out of tune but still tender.
Steel’s prose became a lullaby for exhaustion. Each page asked quietly: what does it mean to go home when the person you were no longer fits inside your old skin? And I realised that the return isn’t physical—it’s interpretive. We keep re-reading our past until we make peace with its syntax.
Barthes once wrote that the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture. Steel’s debut is precisely that—a tapestry of 20th-century feminine desire stitched together from the echoes of Hollywood scripts, magazine advice columns, and domestic tragedies. However, it’s also something more radical: an assertion that women’s emotional labour can be literature.
The tears, the waiting, the letters unsent—all become narrative material, worthy of attention. Steel takes what patriarchal discourse dismisses as trivial and renders it monumental. That act, however unintentional, is political. It’s also deeply personal, and that’s where the novel gets under my skin. I can’t separate Gillian’s story from the ghosts of women I’ve known—mothers, teachers, friends—who were taught to measure selfhood by who returned their affection.
There is a passage early in the novel—simple, almost invisible—where Gillian looks out of a window and imagines what would happen if she simply walked away from everything. That single moment, barely half a page, becomes the novel’s quiet philosophy: the desire to leave and the inability to. The oscillation between freedom and belonging structures Steel’s whole career, but here it’s embryonic, fragile. You can see her experimenting with repetition as rhythm, as if learning that emotion needs pattern to survive. Later, when her novels become bestsellers, this rhythm hardens into a formula. But in Going Home, it’s still tender and exploratory. There’s poetry hiding beneath the melodrama.
Reading it through Derrida’s lens of hauntology, I think of the book as an echo chamber for the author’s future selves. Every later novel—Zoya, Jewels, Safe Harbour—already exists in embryo here. The themes—abandonment, forgiveness, the cruel mercy of time—recur like déjà vu.
The reader becomes a temporal wanderer, moving not through plot but through affective recurrence. Each reread feels like a haunting: I’m not just reading Gillian’s story, I’m reading my own earlier readings, my own emotional residues. That’s the postmodern trick Steel pulls off unconsciously—she collapses reader and character into one melancholic continuum. There is no outside of the text; only the recurring ache of recognition.
What fascinates me most, though, is how Going Home prefigures a crisis of authenticity. In the 1970s, sincerity was currency; in the 2020s, it’s nostalgia. When I read Steel now, her unfiltered emotions feel like artefacts from a lost civilisation.
Yet I envy that openness. I envy the narrative certainty that love can be redemptive, that home can heal. Today, we speak in fragments, irony, and meme logic. Steel speaks in paragraphs that believe in closure. Maybe that’s why reading her feels almost spiritual—she offers what modernity denies: the possibility of coherence. Even when it’s artificial, it’s comforting.
And yet, part of me resists. The critic in me wants to dismantle the novel’s gendered assumptions—the way women are often defined through men, or how happiness depends on return rather than escape. But then the confessional voice interrupts: maybe critique itself is another form of longing. Maybe dismantling is how I express care.
When I deconstruct Steel, I’m also protecting her from dismissal. The irony of postmodernism is that it keeps what it claims to destroy. I tear the novel apart only to find myself weeping inside its ruins.
When Gillian finally returns home, it’s not triumph but quiet surrender. There’s no grand revelation, only a subtle alignment between memory and acceptance. That is when I realise Going Home is not about homecoming at all—it’s about translation. The self, displaced by love and loss, must translate its grief into narrative form. In that sense, Steel anticipates Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic mother—writing as a maternal act, language as nurture. Each sentence feels like a hand reaching out, not for brilliance, but for touch.
I finish the book and sit with the aftertaste—sweet, slightly embarrassing, entirely human. I think of how many readers, mostly women, must have found solace in these pages over decades, how many quiet nights were softened by Steel’s assurance that pain can be narrated into meaning.
And maybe that’s the ultimate postmodern confession: meaning doesn’t reside in the text, or the theory, or even the self. It exists in the act of reading—the moment you and I, across time, make sense of someone else’s heartbreak and call it our own.
Going Home remains flawed, naive, and luminous. It’s not just Danielle Steel’s beginning—it’s a mirror held up to every reader who has ever tried to go back, knowing full well that home is a fiction we choose to believe in because disbelief hurts too much.
Try it, if you choose.
When I think of Danielle Steel’s Going Home, I do not think of the plot first. I think of the texture of 1970s paperbacks, that faint yellowing of desire and despair, the kind of novel that waited for someone to take it seriously, even though it pretended it didn’t care. The book feels like a woman writing herself into existence before the world had learnt to listen properly.
And perhaps that’s where Barthes begins whispering—this is not a story about a woman returning home, but about language trying to reclaim the body that birthed it. The “home” in Steel’s title isn’t geographic; it’s semiotic. It’s the fragile place where the signified collapses into the signifier, and the woman—beautiful, wounded, necessary—tries to rebuild meaning from loss.
At the surface, Going Home is conventional: a young woman, Gillian Forrester, moves through heartbreak, ambition, and reconciliation, returning to the site of her beginnings. It’s a debut, still unpolished, with traces of commercial instinct fighting for space with real yearning. Yet beneath its melodrama is something raw, uncalculated—a pulse of uncertainty that makes it human.
Steel writes as though she is not yet Danielle Steel, the brand, but Danielle the witness. You can feel her hesitating at the edge of her own authority, asking if romantic suffering could ever be translated into narrative redemption. Kristeva would call it the chora, the pre-symbolic rhythm where emotion lives before it becomes syntax. That rhythm drives this book: sentences that repeat, ache, then suddenly find their footing again, as though Steel herself were learning to walk through love’s debris.
There’s something oddly liberating about how unguarded the prose is. It is not stylised. It does not aspire to literary approval. It simply is, like a diary that refuses to be ashamed of being sentimental. Reading it now, in 2025, feels like opening a time capsule from a pre-ironic age—before everything needed to be framed, detached, or clever.
Steel’s sincerity is her rebellion. In a culture that equates depth with darkness, she writes about light, persistence, and forgiveness. Derrida might have smirked at her faith in closure, in the notion that home can ever be found rather than perpetually deferred—but perhaps that’s her genius. She performs différance without realising it: every time Gillian seems to settle into comfort, something slips—a phone call, a memory, a whisper of old pain—and meaning dislocates again. Love, in Steel’s world, is not a noun but a chain of substitutions, always reaching toward what’s absent.
I remember reading Going Home during a particularly strange summer in my own life. Hospitals smelt like bleach and loneliness, and someone I cared about was far away. I found the book in a pile of discarded romances, the cover slightly torn, the pages soft from humidity. I expected it to be cliché, but the clichés were oddly reassuring—like hearing an old song out of tune but still tender.
Steel’s prose became a lullaby for exhaustion. Each page asked quietly: what does it mean to go home when the person you were no longer fits inside your old skin? And I realised that the return isn’t physical—it’s interpretive. We keep re-reading our past until we make peace with its syntax.
Barthes once wrote that the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture. Steel’s debut is precisely that—a tapestry of 20th-century feminine desire stitched together from the echoes of Hollywood scripts, magazine advice columns, and domestic tragedies. However, it’s also something more radical: an assertion that women’s emotional labour can be literature.
The tears, the waiting, the letters unsent—all become narrative material, worthy of attention. Steel takes what patriarchal discourse dismisses as trivial and renders it monumental. That act, however unintentional, is political. It’s also deeply personal, and that’s where the novel gets under my skin. I can’t separate Gillian’s story from the ghosts of women I’ve known—mothers, teachers, friends—who were taught to measure selfhood by who returned their affection.
There is a passage early in the novel—simple, almost invisible—where Gillian looks out of a window and imagines what would happen if she simply walked away from everything. That single moment, barely half a page, becomes the novel’s quiet philosophy: the desire to leave and the inability to. The oscillation between freedom and belonging structures Steel’s whole career, but here it’s embryonic, fragile. You can see her experimenting with repetition as rhythm, as if learning that emotion needs pattern to survive. Later, when her novels become bestsellers, this rhythm hardens into a formula. But in Going Home, it’s still tender and exploratory. There’s poetry hiding beneath the melodrama.
Reading it through Derrida’s lens of hauntology, I think of the book as an echo chamber for the author’s future selves. Every later novel—Zoya, Jewels, Safe Harbour—already exists in embryo here. The themes—abandonment, forgiveness, the cruel mercy of time—recur like déjà vu.
The reader becomes a temporal wanderer, moving not through plot but through affective recurrence. Each reread feels like a haunting: I’m not just reading Gillian’s story, I’m reading my own earlier readings, my own emotional residues. That’s the postmodern trick Steel pulls off unconsciously—she collapses reader and character into one melancholic continuum. There is no outside of the text; only the recurring ache of recognition.
What fascinates me most, though, is how Going Home prefigures a crisis of authenticity. In the 1970s, sincerity was currency; in the 2020s, it’s nostalgia. When I read Steel now, her unfiltered emotions feel like artefacts from a lost civilisation.
Yet I envy that openness. I envy the narrative certainty that love can be redemptive, that home can heal. Today, we speak in fragments, irony, and meme logic. Steel speaks in paragraphs that believe in closure. Maybe that’s why reading her feels almost spiritual—she offers what modernity denies: the possibility of coherence. Even when it’s artificial, it’s comforting.
And yet, part of me resists. The critic in me wants to dismantle the novel’s gendered assumptions—the way women are often defined through men, or how happiness depends on return rather than escape. But then the confessional voice interrupts: maybe critique itself is another form of longing. Maybe dismantling is how I express care.
When I deconstruct Steel, I’m also protecting her from dismissal. The irony of postmodernism is that it keeps what it claims to destroy. I tear the novel apart only to find myself weeping inside its ruins.
When Gillian finally returns home, it’s not triumph but quiet surrender. There’s no grand revelation, only a subtle alignment between memory and acceptance. That is when I realise Going Home is not about homecoming at all—it’s about translation. The self, displaced by love and loss, must translate its grief into narrative form. In that sense, Steel anticipates Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic mother—writing as a maternal act, language as nurture. Each sentence feels like a hand reaching out, not for brilliance, but for touch.
I finish the book and sit with the aftertaste—sweet, slightly embarrassing, entirely human. I think of how many readers, mostly women, must have found solace in these pages over decades, how many quiet nights were softened by Steel’s assurance that pain can be narrated into meaning.
And maybe that’s the ultimate postmodern confession: meaning doesn’t reside in the text, or the theory, or even the self. It exists in the act of reading—the moment you and I, across time, make sense of someone else’s heartbreak and call it our own.
Going Home remains flawed, naive, and luminous. It’s not just Danielle Steel’s beginning—it’s a mirror held up to every reader who has ever tried to go back, knowing full well that home is a fiction we choose to believe in because disbelief hurts too much.
Try it, if you choose.
June 15, 2022
Gillard decides to move to California for a job and meets a whole new lifestyle. Will Chris be the one for her or not???
January 3, 2015
Home is a contemporary story - contemporary for its early 70s publication time - but I wouldn't call it a romance. When I opened the book to find a first person POV I held back a groan. It's not a POV Steel utilizes often, but the last one of hers I read with it wasn't a favorite. If first person has an advantage here, though, it prevented the dreaded info-dump before the action.
This is a story about a divorced mother, Gillian, who freelances as a set stylist. If there's a more technical term for what she does, it's not mentioned. Gillian lives in early 70s San Francisco on the fringe of late-era hippiedom, pre-Watergate. She falls into instalove with a film director, Chris, who's only looking for a good time. Chris is basically a self-absorbed asshole who does what he wants and waffles between romantic fool and "Look, a doormat with a vagina." Gillian fades in and out of TSTL territory with the guy, and when she becomes pregnant his solution is to have her move against her will to the other side of the country. He's so freaked out he can't even be on the same coast - how badly do you want to punch this guy in the back of the head?
Without revealing the whole story, I'll share my likes/dislikes:
Likes
Steel's style wasn't all that bad. Later books of hers read like enhanced summaries - all tell no show. There's only a bit here, but for the most part the structure was good.
Not too many ellipses. Steel is the ellipsis queen, I swear.
Dislikes
Chris, the jerkiest jerk who ever jerked off
Gillian's behavior around him - she comes off as less assertive when he's around.
Smoking and drinking while pregnant. It's a wonder we 70s babies aren't all f'ed up. I don't think Gillian kept an OB/GYN appointment through the whole book.
A sideplot with Gillian dating a playboy lawyer that didn't go anywhere.
An anti-gay slur late in the book that put me off
Neither a like or dislike, but an observation: with this first book you get a sense of the Steel formula readers will enjoy for the next four decades -
Woman with job/romantic struggles
Life-changing event that precedes the need for a job/move
The last guy the heroine meets is typically The One.
Ellipses aplenty
Having satisfied this requirement for the reading challenge, I can probably retire from Steel's readership. Home is her first, not her worst, so if you're looking for a gateway this is one to try.
This is a story about a divorced mother, Gillian, who freelances as a set stylist. If there's a more technical term for what she does, it's not mentioned. Gillian lives in early 70s San Francisco on the fringe of late-era hippiedom, pre-Watergate. She falls into instalove with a film director, Chris, who's only looking for a good time. Chris is basically a self-absorbed asshole who does what he wants and waffles between romantic fool and "Look, a doormat with a vagina." Gillian fades in and out of TSTL territory with the guy, and when she becomes pregnant his solution is to have her move against her will to the other side of the country. He's so freaked out he can't even be on the same coast - how badly do you want to punch this guy in the back of the head?
Without revealing the whole story, I'll share my likes/dislikes:
Likes
Steel's style wasn't all that bad. Later books of hers read like enhanced summaries - all tell no show. There's only a bit here, but for the most part the structure was good.
Not too many ellipses. Steel is the ellipsis queen, I swear.
Dislikes
Chris, the jerkiest jerk who ever jerked off
Gillian's behavior around him - she comes off as less assertive when he's around.
Smoking and drinking while pregnant. It's a wonder we 70s babies aren't all f'ed up. I don't think Gillian kept an OB/GYN appointment through the whole book.
A sideplot with Gillian dating a playboy lawyer that didn't go anywhere.
An anti-gay slur late in the book that put me off
Neither a like or dislike, but an observation: with this first book you get a sense of the Steel formula readers will enjoy for the next four decades -
Woman with job/romantic struggles
Life-changing event that precedes the need for a job/move
The last guy the heroine meets is typically The One.
Ellipses aplenty
Having satisfied this requirement for the reading challenge, I can probably retire from Steel's readership. Home is her first, not her worst, so if you're looking for a gateway this is one to try.
February 11, 2015
1 STARS
"In the sunswept beauty of San Francisco, Gillian Forrester is filled with the joy of a love that will surely last. But a painful betrayal forces her to flee to New York and a new life. There she discovers an exciting new career and a deep, enveloping passion...only to have her newfound happiness shaken to its core. Now Gillian must choose between her future and her past, to find in the deepest desires of her heart the one way, the only way of...Going Home." (From Amazon)
Originally when I read Danielle Steel novels I would have rated them 3-4 STARS, but now I would classify them as 1-2 STARS. These are great for those who like mild sex, unrealistic dramatic romances and grand plots.
"In the sunswept beauty of San Francisco, Gillian Forrester is filled with the joy of a love that will surely last. But a painful betrayal forces her to flee to New York and a new life. There she discovers an exciting new career and a deep, enveloping passion...only to have her newfound happiness shaken to its core. Now Gillian must choose between her future and her past, to find in the deepest desires of her heart the one way, the only way of...Going Home." (From Amazon)
Originally when I read Danielle Steel novels I would have rated them 3-4 STARS, but now I would classify them as 1-2 STARS. These are great for those who like mild sex, unrealistic dramatic romances and grand plots.
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