Holy shit… this hit home. Reading it felt like someone had written down the parts of myself (and my family) I’ve never been able to say out loud — the guilt, the love, the disappointment — all tangled together so tightly it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. I saw myself in all of the characters... and honestly, if you don’t recognize yourself somewhere in this play, you’re probably not looking closely enough.
I’ve hated a lot of the plays I’ve read, mostly because they’re written (obviously) to be performed. They rely on staging, gesture, presence. Without that, they fall flat. But Long Day’s Journey Into Night resists that logic. It feels like it was written to be read alone, in silence. The stage directions go beyond function — they’re often extensive, precisely detailed, and poetic. As much as the dialogue is powerful, it’s the stage directions that carry the weight. I’ll probably watch a performance at some point, but I’m not sure anything could match what lived on the page.
The whole play is built on memory. Memory here is messy, unreliable, emotional. Everything is blurred by pain. Everyone remembers things differently. Everyone blames each other — sometimes gently, sometimes not. But the love never fully disappears, even when they’re at their worst. That was the hardest part. I saw my own family in this. I’m not going to get into details, but I saw my own addiction in it too... the way it lingers, no matter how much you try to fix what’s been broken.
Most stories about addiction focus on the breaking point — the overdose, the fight, the rock bottom. But this play lives in what comes after. The silence. The tension. The way people keep looking at you like you’re still that same person from your worst moment, even when you’re trying to be someone else. It’s not just about getting clean. It’s about living with the damage, the shame, and with people who say they’ve forgiven you but are still holding on to everything you did. They’re still living in the past — and many times, so are you.
What stayed with me most is how the play makes it clear that love doesn’t erase pain. We like to think it should. That love is redemptive. But it doesn’t override everything else. I’ve hurt the people I love. I’ve blamed them for things they couldn’t control. I’ve said things I regret, sometimes just to feel less powerless. And they’ve done the same. What remains isn’t resolution, but this quiet, aching bond — love mixed with guilt, with tiredness, with things that never got said the right way. You want to show up differently, but by the time you open your mouth, the damage is already there. You try to forgive, but the past doesn’t stay buried. It circles back, again and again, demanding to be relived.
And yet, everyone stays. They stay in the same house, the same room, circling the same wounds. Not because it’s healthy. Not because it’s good. But because love doesn’t just vanish, even when it hurts to hold onto it. That’s what makes it so devastating. And that’s what makes it beautiful.
Nothing gets resolved in the end. And that’s what makes it feel honest. Because sometimes there’s no big moment of healing. Sometimes all you can do is sit in the fog and wait for the night to end.
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!
Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.