On Going Home

by Joan Didion

Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1967

About the author

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

Reviews

[carson · Rating 4 out of 5]

*read for class
I have never been drawn in so fast for an essay this short. I had not previously read anything from Joan Didion, but after reading On Going Home, I definitely want to seek out some of her other writings. I related deeply to some of the sentiments she expressed in this essay and am glad I got the opportunity to read it.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one’s past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly from room to room. [...] I close the drawer, and have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerilla war we never understood."

well yes

[greta long · Rating 4 out of 5]

paralyzingly mundane, yet so descriptive. wow.

[Avery Paterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is an essay part of slouching towards bethlehem but i just wanna say it’s so great i read it right before coming home for the summer and yeah