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Home Of Home Essay

Decent Essays

Family is defined differently for everyone. Family members can live down the street or in another country. Some people have close knit families while others do not. Similarly, home is also defined differently for everyone. Some people might believe that home is just the house they live in, and with each move comes a new home. Others, however, believe that home is where their family is. People use family as a way to define home in slightly different ways. For example, in her essay “On Going Home,” Joan Didion writes about wanting to give her daughter “home” for her birthday. Didion describes her home as being where her family is. In his essay, “Coming Home Again,” Chang-Rae Lee uses his mother as a way of defining his home. In the third …show more content…

While her husband does not understand many things her family talks about or why they talk about the particular things they do, Didion is most comfortable talking about such things when she is home with her family. Toward the end of the essay Didion writes about her daughter, “I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother's teacups… I would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that” (Didion 3). Didion wants her daughter to grow up with the same sense of home and family that she did, along with the same sentimental values. However, because her daughter will grow up in a different time and place than Didion did, it is unlikely that she will grow up with the same experiences. In Chang-Rae Lee’s “Coming Home Again,” he discreetly uses his mother as a way of defining home. Lee uses various fond memories of his mother to illustrate the childhood he had before he went to school away from home at Exeter. He writes, “When I was six or seven years old, I used to watch my mother as she prepared our favorite meals” (Lee 4). In another flashback he states, “My mother could whip up most anything, but during our first years of living in this

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