Family Life in Didion and Lee: Home, Drift, and Sacrifice

Introduction: What Home Means for Didion and Lee

In On Going Home, Joan Didion defines family not by the household she shares with her husband and child in Los Angeles, but by the place where her original family lives. Dust is one of the defining features of that family home — surfaces are covered in it, and when her husband once wrote the word "D-U-S-T" across those surfaces, no one noticed. She describes her home fittingly as "difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate." The reader can observe the family's obliqueness in the topics Didion chooses to discuss with her brother: the people they know who have been committed to mental hospitals, or who have been charged with drunk driving (Didion 2).

For Chang-rae Lee, writing in Coming Home Again, the defining image of home is his mother's illness. The rhythmic sound of her electronic pump as she moved through the house stayed with him most vividly. He writes that the sound of her machine could be heard from anywhere in the house, and that when she paused — for air, or to steady herself — everything stopped with her. The word "black" in his phrase "the world of our house turning once more, wheeling through the black" (Lee 1) conveys a deep and settled misery, shaped by his mother's stomach cancer.

Family Identity and the Meaning of Home

Through her portrayal of family life, Didion's conservative nature is evident. She does not fully accept that the home she grew up in has been replaced by the one she has made with her husband. This is revealed by how quickly she reverts to her family's ways when she returns. Her husband likes her family but feels uneasy around them, precisely because she tends to fall back into "their ways." This suggests that the family of her origin retains a powerful hold over her — one that her marriage has not displaced.

Her attachment to the Central Valley of California is unmistakable. She and her brother continue to discuss property, drunk-driving arrests, and neighbors committed to mental hospitals — the ongoing life of the town. Family for Didion means her father's family: her brother, her father, and the extended family, including great-aunts (Didion 5). Her husband and child are not part of what she calls "home" in the deepest sense of the word.

For Lee, family is his mother, father, and sister — with his mother at the center. She dominates the family throughout the narrative. Her illness has compelled her daughter to resign from her job in New York and has caused her father to come home hours earlier than usual. Even after her death, the family members struggle to function without her: Lee writes that he and his father drifted through the house like ghosts, uncertain of how to live in her absence (Lee 1–6).

Of the two portrayals, Didion's version of home life more closely resembles what home means to me. The experience of family members moving away, the persistent pull of the place where one grew up, the shared gossip about familiar people and events — these all resonate. So too does the way that difficult personalities come to define a household.

Drifting Apart: When Families Separate

Both texts portray family estrangement — the gradual process by which members drift away from one another as circumstances change. In Lee's case, his departure for boarding school in New Hampshire marks the beginning of his growing distance from his mother. He notes that she would sometimes sit with him for an hour or two after his father had gone to sleep before kissing him goodnight, a sign of the awkwardness that had grown between them (Lee 1–6).

Ironically, it was his mother who chose to send him away. She told him that it was better he went, because if he had stayed close to her for too long, he would eventually have grown to dislike her. She accepted the rift in their relationship in order to protect her son from resentment. Yet the decision haunted her until the end of her life, and Lee himself admits that he still wonders whether going to boarding school was a mistake.

His mother's illness, however, partially reverses this drift. Her illness brings the family back together: his sister returns from New York, his father shortens his working hours. The crisis that tears families apart can also, paradoxically, draw them back in.

Didion's family has also experienced its own form of drift. She has left the family home and built a life with her husband in Los Angeles. When she returns, she finds herself slightly out of step with recent developments, reduced to speaking with her brother about real estate and town gossip to reconnect. A visit to her great-aunts makes the drift concrete: they have forgotten that she has been living in Los Angeles for three years and still believe she lives in New York (Didion 3–5).

Taken together, these portrayals suggest a society with loosening familial ties, where the ease of moving between family configurations reflects bonds that are real but fragile. At the same time, both families demonstrate resilience. When Lee's mother is dying, the family makes substantial sacrifices to be present — his sister's career, his father's working hours. The same society that allows families to drift also pulls them together in moments of crisis.

Conclusion: Families in Society

The two stories bring into focus the various issues surrounding how family members interact as a unit. The lives of the people in both essays revolve mainly around the family and its daily activities and struggles. Together, Didion's and Lee's accounts suggest that families in contemporary American society are neither entirely stable nor entirely fragile — they drift, but they also return; they grow apart, but crisis draws them back. What defines a family, both authors imply, is not physical proximity but the persistent pull of shared memory, sacrifice, and belonging.

Works Cited

Lee, Chang-rae. "Coming Home Again." What a Son Remembers When All That Is Left Are Memories, 2006, pp. 1–6. Print.

Didion, Joan. "On Going Home." Beacon Book of Essays: Contemporary American Women, 1997, pp. 3–5. Print.