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Play It As It Lays
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
231 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
About the author
Joan Didion
85 books14.5k followersJoan 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 8,695 reviews
July 19, 2021
I did not enjoy a single moment of reading this book but I like it. Honestly don’t read if you’re feeling depressed, as it is depression incarnate. Chapter 42 was so incisively brutal that I had to take a breather for a while. Still 5 stars lol
September 6, 2024
Everything, eventually, gets old.
People get gray hairs. Cookies get stale. Books get that amazing smell that is apparently just mold or mildew or something awful but we won't think about it because, to paraphrase Wesley from the Princess Bride, there is a shortage of perfect things in this world and it would be a shame to ruin this one. Comedians start being f*cked up and stop being funny and call it persecution.
Age comes for us all.
But one thing that will never get old is women writing works of literary fiction about hot girls losing their minds.
It's a timeless classic, relatable through the years. Whether it's a recent work of pseudo-historical fiction written in a bad time about the time that sort of cemented it that way, or a half-century old ode to the era it already was. The setting doesn't matter, the framing doesn't matter. Give me writing that's glossy or gross or both, a protagonist who's making it or faking it or neither, background characters who get it or don't or don't want to. I love it all.
For whatever reason, nothing makes me feel as seen as books like this. And nothing makes me feel as sure that everything will be okay as books where people feel the same way as I do, and think the same thoughts, and everything, ultimately, isn't.
Call me crazy.
Bottom line: I took my little self to the internet and paid above market value for a first-edition second-printing hardcover of this. In other words - this is a rave review.
--------------
pre-review
mental breakdown fiction >>>>>>
review to come / 4 stars
--------------
tbr review
hot girl required reading
People get gray hairs. Cookies get stale. Books get that amazing smell that is apparently just mold or mildew or something awful but we won't think about it because, to paraphrase Wesley from the Princess Bride, there is a shortage of perfect things in this world and it would be a shame to ruin this one. Comedians start being f*cked up and stop being funny and call it persecution.
Age comes for us all.
But one thing that will never get old is women writing works of literary fiction about hot girls losing their minds.
It's a timeless classic, relatable through the years. Whether it's a recent work of pseudo-historical fiction written in a bad time about the time that sort of cemented it that way, or a half-century old ode to the era it already was. The setting doesn't matter, the framing doesn't matter. Give me writing that's glossy or gross or both, a protagonist who's making it or faking it or neither, background characters who get it or don't or don't want to. I love it all.
For whatever reason, nothing makes me feel as seen as books like this. And nothing makes me feel as sure that everything will be okay as books where people feel the same way as I do, and think the same thoughts, and everything, ultimately, isn't.
Call me crazy.
Bottom line: I took my little self to the internet and paid above market value for a first-edition second-printing hardcover of this. In other words - this is a rave review.
--------------
pre-review
mental breakdown fiction >>>>>>
review to come / 4 stars
--------------
tbr review
hot girl required reading
February 7, 2017
"I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what when out on the last. I no longer believe that."
- Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
(
Warning: This book is not to be read if suicidal, heavily medicated, driving, pregnant, or if you ever dream of walking out, alone, into the Nevada desert and not coming back. This book is pure existential peril. I remember when I was four being specifically afraid of our church's bathroom. I remember thinking the church was hallowed ground. Protected by some benign force. Nothing could get me in the church. I was safe. But I'd sit alone, in a stall, in the bathroom, and look at the white tile, white grout, and see the dark drain on the floor. I'd imagine all the terror that existed under the Church. The snakes that were waiting to crawl through the drain. The devil waiting to pull me into the unsanctified, unhallowed, shit-filled sewers. Yeah, this book made me think of that empty feeling, that feeling that even in safe places there were gaps, snakes, sewers, and darkness.
This book also reminds me a bit of a combination of The Great Gatsby (but told by Daisy in California in the 1960s) and Less Than Zero (but told by Blair and Julian's parents). Actually, hell, the book could be F. Scott and Zelda in the 1960s. Anyway, I get a weird F. Scott and Bret Easton Ellis vibe, with perhaps just a little of Cormac McCarthy's cold Western, existential dread thrown in for flavor. It is one of those novels that is near perfect and also a razor blade under your tongue. It is dangerous and sharp and makes you nervous to find out what is next.
There are snakes and cracks everywhere. Plants die. Memory fades. Nothing matters. Well, O.K. Joan Didion's prose matters. It matters a hell of a lot. Joan Didion's prose just might be one reason to keep living. To keep fighting. To keep turning the damn page and rolling the damn dice.
- Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
(Warning: This book is not to be read if suicidal, heavily medicated, driving, pregnant, or if you ever dream of walking out, alone, into the Nevada desert and not coming back. This book is pure existential peril. I remember when I was four being specifically afraid of our church's bathroom. I remember thinking the church was hallowed ground. Protected by some benign force. Nothing could get me in the church. I was safe. But I'd sit alone, in a stall, in the bathroom, and look at the white tile, white grout, and see the dark drain on the floor. I'd imagine all the terror that existed under the Church. The snakes that were waiting to crawl through the drain. The devil waiting to pull me into the unsanctified, unhallowed, shit-filled sewers. Yeah, this book made me think of that empty feeling, that feeling that even in safe places there were gaps, snakes, sewers, and darkness.
This book also reminds me a bit of a combination of The Great Gatsby (but told by Daisy in California in the 1960s) and Less Than Zero (but told by Blair and Julian's parents). Actually, hell, the book could be F. Scott and Zelda in the 1960s. Anyway, I get a weird F. Scott and Bret Easton Ellis vibe, with perhaps just a little of Cormac McCarthy's cold Western, existential dread thrown in for flavor. It is one of those novels that is near perfect and also a razor blade under your tongue. It is dangerous and sharp and makes you nervous to find out what is next.
There are snakes and cracks everywhere. Plants die. Memory fades. Nothing matters. Well, O.K. Joan Didion's prose matters. It matters a hell of a lot. Joan Didion's prose just might be one reason to keep living. To keep fighting. To keep turning the damn page and rolling the damn dice.
December 10, 2021
The name of the game
NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.
Even if I had initially the intention to embark on a collection of her essays or The Year of Magical Thinking first, Play It As it Lays happened to be my first Joan Didion. Because of the enthusiast recommendations that reached me over the years, I had high hopes on reading Didion and my expectations were surpassed: Play It as It Lays turned out a pretty fabulous as well as rather chilling (despite the blazing heat of the setting) reading experience, deeply soaked in existential angst, alienation, loneliness and motorcycle emptiness – taking the shape of the Corvette emptiness of Maria Wyeth’s disintegrating, almost comatose life, while accompanied by a soundtrack of nothingness obsessive--compulsively cruising the freeways from San Diego to the Harbour, through Hollywood to the Golden State:
She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking.
Maria Wyeth is a minor actress who tries to keep afloat in the snake-infested inferno of the film business after a traumatising abortion, divorcing the abusive and violent director she was married to and seeing herself obliged to leave her four year old daughter in an institution. From young age, she learnt to look at life in terms of card games and to play the cards you are dealt with, a philosophy of life in which opting in means adjusting to the cruel rules of the game – or crashing out – a game one can only hold on if one accepts there are no answers on the question why things are the way they are. The reader first meets in her in a mental institution, gradually discovering why she is there when the story unfolds.
France, Roman Holiday, my mother’s yearnings suffused our life like nerve gas.
More than just another variation on the stories paving the boulevard of broken dreams, Maria’s is a grim story of deprivation, violence and abuse – an anti-idyll.
In the whole world there was not as much sedation as there was instantaneous peril.
Stuck in an emotional, psychological and physical wasteland, numbed by the drugs and alcohol she seeks oblivion in, the motionlessness of Maria’s life is counterpointed by her aimless driving on freeways. Maria cloaks herself in silence – numerous times Didion repeats that she says nothing, frustrating her husband Carter and friend Helene by her glazed expression. Lacking a script for life, Maria’s mental state is accidie, as echoed by Joan Didion’s personal experiences illustrated by the medical record she dryly quotes in her essay The White Album. Depression, obsessive-compulsive behaviour dependent, passive withdrawal, a total disconnection from herself and others: emotionally, patient has alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings.
Evidently it doesn’t help that Maria has ended up in a biotope where human relations are merely instrumentalist and misfortune and sorrow are avoided like the plague: Trouble was something no one in the city liked to be near. Failure, illness, fear, they were seen as infectious, contagious blights on glossy plants. .
The recurrent appearance of (rattle)snakes in the text brought this song from teenage days back to my mind. Reading the lyrics, they seem to voice Maria Wyeth’s state of mind uncannily. My hunch of a connection seemed correct – ostensibly the idea for the song came from the considerations in the novel that life is a crap game and that are there are rattlesnakes under every rock.
Elliptical and thriving on a couple of powerful metaphors (like the snakes recurring twelve times) and the use of the word nothing, Didion lets many blanks in the narrative open to the reader to fill in when attempting to read the mental and emotional state of Maria. I read this novel twice, because I was intrigued by the resilient elusiveness of Maria and her relatable mindset of self-punishment, her sense of sin and guilt when her life derails. I wanted to slowly savour the magnificent writing again, having gobbled up the novel ravenously the first time. The second time was even more crushing, touched I was by Maria’s stubborn determination to carry on and pursue her life instead of opting for suicide as a way out of her dead-end life – not giving up the hope of taking up a life together with her daughter Kate again – her lifeline.
I don’t think I have read a book in which blanks and silences speak so eloquently as in Play It As It Lays before. Nor did I read one in which the word nothing equalled so much despair.
She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers’ patter, the beginning of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics.
My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was to reveal a rattlesnake.
As much as it is true that life for Maria is a crap game, she is a survivor and knows the rules: I know what nothing means and keep on playing.
Being and Nothingness in Hollywood?
(paintings David Hockney)
NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.
Even if I had initially the intention to embark on a collection of her essays or The Year of Magical Thinking first, Play It As it Lays happened to be my first Joan Didion. Because of the enthusiast recommendations that reached me over the years, I had high hopes on reading Didion and my expectations were surpassed: Play It as It Lays turned out a pretty fabulous as well as rather chilling (despite the blazing heat of the setting) reading experience, deeply soaked in existential angst, alienation, loneliness and motorcycle emptiness – taking the shape of the Corvette emptiness of Maria Wyeth’s disintegrating, almost comatose life, while accompanied by a soundtrack of nothingness obsessive--compulsively cruising the freeways from San Diego to the Harbour, through Hollywood to the Golden State:
She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking.
Maria Wyeth is a minor actress who tries to keep afloat in the snake-infested inferno of the film business after a traumatising abortion, divorcing the abusive and violent director she was married to and seeing herself obliged to leave her four year old daughter in an institution. From young age, she learnt to look at life in terms of card games and to play the cards you are dealt with, a philosophy of life in which opting in means adjusting to the cruel rules of the game – or crashing out – a game one can only hold on if one accepts there are no answers on the question why things are the way they are. The reader first meets in her in a mental institution, gradually discovering why she is there when the story unfolds.
France, Roman Holiday, my mother’s yearnings suffused our life like nerve gas.
More than just another variation on the stories paving the boulevard of broken dreams, Maria’s is a grim story of deprivation, violence and abuse – an anti-idyll.
In the whole world there was not as much sedation as there was instantaneous peril.
Stuck in an emotional, psychological and physical wasteland, numbed by the drugs and alcohol she seeks oblivion in, the motionlessness of Maria’s life is counterpointed by her aimless driving on freeways. Maria cloaks herself in silence – numerous times Didion repeats that she says nothing, frustrating her husband Carter and friend Helene by her glazed expression. Lacking a script for life, Maria’s mental state is accidie, as echoed by Joan Didion’s personal experiences illustrated by the medical record she dryly quotes in her essay The White Album. Depression, obsessive-compulsive behaviour dependent, passive withdrawal, a total disconnection from herself and others: emotionally, patient has alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings.
Evidently it doesn’t help that Maria has ended up in a biotope where human relations are merely instrumentalist and misfortune and sorrow are avoided like the plague: Trouble was something no one in the city liked to be near. Failure, illness, fear, they were seen as infectious, contagious blights on glossy plants. .
The recurrent appearance of (rattle)snakes in the text brought this song from teenage days back to my mind. Reading the lyrics, they seem to voice Maria Wyeth’s state of mind uncannily. My hunch of a connection seemed correct – ostensibly the idea for the song came from the considerations in the novel that life is a crap game and that are there are rattlesnakes under every rock.
Elliptical and thriving on a couple of powerful metaphors (like the snakes recurring twelve times) and the use of the word nothing, Didion lets many blanks in the narrative open to the reader to fill in when attempting to read the mental and emotional state of Maria. I read this novel twice, because I was intrigued by the resilient elusiveness of Maria and her relatable mindset of self-punishment, her sense of sin and guilt when her life derails. I wanted to slowly savour the magnificent writing again, having gobbled up the novel ravenously the first time. The second time was even more crushing, touched I was by Maria’s stubborn determination to carry on and pursue her life instead of opting for suicide as a way out of her dead-end life – not giving up the hope of taking up a life together with her daughter Kate again – her lifeline.
I don’t think I have read a book in which blanks and silences speak so eloquently as in Play It As It Lays before. Nor did I read one in which the word nothing equalled so much despair.
She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers’ patter, the beginning of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics.
My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was to reveal a rattlesnake.
As much as it is true that life for Maria is a crap game, she is a survivor and knows the rules: I know what nothing means and keep on playing.
Being and Nothingness in Hollywood?
(paintings David Hockney)
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December 15, 2022
MARIA C’EST MOI
Il manifesto del film omonimo del 1972 diretto da Frank Perry e sceneggiato dalla stessa Didion.
Ogni libro di Joan Didion che leggo è più bello del precedente, e sono tutti magnifici.
Non è certo la trama che lo rende così grande, perché la storia è già sentita, ed è presto detta: giovane starlet di Hollywood precocemente sul viale del tramonto, in preda a ennui divide il suo tempo tra sesso, droghe, troppo poco r&r, e farmaci vari; sono presenti registi, produttori e attori, film girati nel deserto californiano, cocktail, party, ristoranti, lounge, Las Vegas, casino, Corvette, suicidi, tentati o riusciti; fragilità, vite sbandate irrisolte in fuga…
Tutto già visto e già sentito, in parte già anche vissuto.
I due protagonisti del film, Tuesday Weld e Anthony Perkins.
Didion prende questa banale materia e la trasforma in qualcosa d’irripetibile: per farlo, usa lo strumento principale della sua professione, le parole: quelle che sceglie, le parole che lascia, e quelle che sceglie di tacere…
Dietro questo breve romanzo c’è una lezione di scrittura, a partire dal lungo lavoro di lima, che mi ricorda molto quello dell’autore di Madame Bovary: riflettere e misurare, tagliare e aggiungere, togliere e mettere, tagliare di nuovo e aggiungere di nuovo, nell’incessante perenne ricerca dell'unica parola giusta (‘le mot juste’ di flaubertiana memoria, appunto), quella che permette di proseguire.
Per arrivare a scrivere così, occorre grande talento e sconfinata tenacia:
Era l'ora in cui in ogni casa del vicinato le belle donne si profumavano e si infilavano i braccialetti di smalto e davano il bacio della buonanotte ai loro bei bambini, l'ora della grazia apparente e della musica promessa, e nel giardino di Maria l'aria sapeva di gelsomino e l'acqua della piscina toccava i trenta gradi.
Didion intreccia i punti di vista: il romanzo si apre con il breve racconto in prima persona della protagonista, Maria, pronuncia Mar-ai-a, tanto per chiarire le cose fin dal principio, al quale seguono quelli ancora più brevi, sempre in prima persona, dell’amica Helene, e del marito Carter. Poi entra in scena il narratore e la storia procede fino alla fine affidata alla sua voce, salvo qualche raro intermezzo in prima persona nel quale ritorna il punto di vista di Maria (pronuncia Mar-ai-a).
Capitoli e capitoletti, salti avanti e indietro nel tempo, omissioni secondo il precetto hemingwayano dell’iceberg, uno stile che unisce distanza e calore, sospensione e immersione, impalpabilità e profondità, precisione ed evanescenza, uno stile che riesce nell’impresa di essere nella stessa pagina, gelido e struggente, sublime e durissimo.
E allora la banalità della storia di Maria è solo apparente: Maria è un’eroina che non dimenticherò e ho già voglia di ritrovare e leggere di nuovo, ancora.
Didion rinuncia al contrasto tra bene e male: penetra l’essenza intima dei personaggi, ognuno agisce seguendo delle motivazioni che sono in fondo comprensibili, ognuno è l’eroe della sua storia, non li rinchiude con il suo giudizio, hanno tutti un’anima e sono capaci di redenzione, li racconta dalla ‘giusta distanza’, così lontano e così vicino, non li condanna e non li abbandona mai.
Vita vissuta nel dolore e trascorsa nella sofferenza – un buco nero che risucchia e un vuoto enorme che consuma, nella costante attesa che arrivi quell’amore di cui è stata privata già dall’infanzia – trentuno anni, che sono tredici, ma anche già cento – un’esistenza sbagliata, un’anima in fuga, una solitudine che circonda…
Maria piange molto, guida la sua Corvette per autostrade che portano nel deserto - più che vivere, trascorre il tempo - parla poco e quando parla non dice nulla sul motivo delle sue lacrime - vorrebbe ma non può, vorrebbe crescere sua figlia che invece vive in una clinica per gravi malattie, vorrebbe tenere il figlio che ha in grembo ma deve perderlo, vorrebbe restare con Carter ma sa che è inutile…
Lieve sospesa tenera delicata dura glaciale Maria, ti svegli al mattino con gli occhi gonfi e pesanti e ti chiedi se hai pianto nel sonno, vorresti prendere la vita come viene e stare al gioco ma proprio non ce la fai, non ti riesce, Maria, sei arrivata là dove nulla esiste e non hai più voglia di giocare…
Grandissima, immensa Joan.
Il manifesto del film omonimo del 1972 diretto da Frank Perry e sceneggiato dalla stessa Didion.
Ogni libro di Joan Didion che leggo è più bello del precedente, e sono tutti magnifici.
Non è certo la trama che lo rende così grande, perché la storia è già sentita, ed è presto detta: giovane starlet di Hollywood precocemente sul viale del tramonto, in preda a ennui divide il suo tempo tra sesso, droghe, troppo poco r&r, e farmaci vari; sono presenti registi, produttori e attori, film girati nel deserto californiano, cocktail, party, ristoranti, lounge, Las Vegas, casino, Corvette, suicidi, tentati o riusciti; fragilità, vite sbandate irrisolte in fuga…
Tutto già visto e già sentito, in parte già anche vissuto.
I due protagonisti del film, Tuesday Weld e Anthony Perkins.
Didion prende questa banale materia e la trasforma in qualcosa d’irripetibile: per farlo, usa lo strumento principale della sua professione, le parole: quelle che sceglie, le parole che lascia, e quelle che sceglie di tacere…
Dietro questo breve romanzo c’è una lezione di scrittura, a partire dal lungo lavoro di lima, che mi ricorda molto quello dell’autore di Madame Bovary: riflettere e misurare, tagliare e aggiungere, togliere e mettere, tagliare di nuovo e aggiungere di nuovo, nell’incessante perenne ricerca dell'unica parola giusta (‘le mot juste’ di flaubertiana memoria, appunto), quella che permette di proseguire.
Per arrivare a scrivere così, occorre grande talento e sconfinata tenacia:
Era l'ora in cui in ogni casa del vicinato le belle donne si profumavano e si infilavano i braccialetti di smalto e davano il bacio della buonanotte ai loro bei bambini, l'ora della grazia apparente e della musica promessa, e nel giardino di Maria l'aria sapeva di gelsomino e l'acqua della piscina toccava i trenta gradi.
Didion intreccia i punti di vista: il romanzo si apre con il breve racconto in prima persona della protagonista, Maria, pronuncia Mar-ai-a, tanto per chiarire le cose fin dal principio, al quale seguono quelli ancora più brevi, sempre in prima persona, dell’amica Helene, e del marito Carter. Poi entra in scena il narratore e la storia procede fino alla fine affidata alla sua voce, salvo qualche raro intermezzo in prima persona nel quale ritorna il punto di vista di Maria (pronuncia Mar-ai-a).
Capitoli e capitoletti, salti avanti e indietro nel tempo, omissioni secondo il precetto hemingwayano dell’iceberg, uno stile che unisce distanza e calore, sospensione e immersione, impalpabilità e profondità, precisione ed evanescenza, uno stile che riesce nell’impresa di essere nella stessa pagina, gelido e struggente, sublime e durissimo.
E allora la banalità della storia di Maria è solo apparente: Maria è un’eroina che non dimenticherò e ho già voglia di ritrovare e leggere di nuovo, ancora.
Didion rinuncia al contrasto tra bene e male: penetra l’essenza intima dei personaggi, ognuno agisce seguendo delle motivazioni che sono in fondo comprensibili, ognuno è l’eroe della sua storia, non li rinchiude con il suo giudizio, hanno tutti un’anima e sono capaci di redenzione, li racconta dalla ‘giusta distanza’, così lontano e così vicino, non li condanna e non li abbandona mai.
Vita vissuta nel dolore e trascorsa nella sofferenza – un buco nero che risucchia e un vuoto enorme che consuma, nella costante attesa che arrivi quell’amore di cui è stata privata già dall’infanzia – trentuno anni, che sono tredici, ma anche già cento – un’esistenza sbagliata, un’anima in fuga, una solitudine che circonda…
Maria piange molto, guida la sua Corvette per autostrade che portano nel deserto - più che vivere, trascorre il tempo - parla poco e quando parla non dice nulla sul motivo delle sue lacrime - vorrebbe ma non può, vorrebbe crescere sua figlia che invece vive in una clinica per gravi malattie, vorrebbe tenere il figlio che ha in grembo ma deve perderlo, vorrebbe restare con Carter ma sa che è inutile…
Lieve sospesa tenera delicata dura glaciale Maria, ti svegli al mattino con gli occhi gonfi e pesanti e ti chiedi se hai pianto nel sonno, vorresti prendere la vita come viene e stare al gioco ma proprio non ce la fai, non ti riesce, Maria, sei arrivata là dove nulla esiste e non hai più voglia di giocare…
Grandissima, immensa Joan.
December 23, 2021
“There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.”
Joan Didion
Whenever Maria called, it was as if the ringing of the phone heralded the end of any conviviality I might have been harboring. I always had the impression when I talked with her that the Fun to Be Around Maria was dying in another room, and all I was left with was the beautiful corpse.
She was beautiful. Even though we had all seen changes to her appearance recently. So beautiful, in fact, she could still get acting jobs without too much trouble. I could see this all ending soon because she was so morose that her mood permeated the whole movie set. She had become so lost, so indifferent to everything. She was a zombie, long before Hollywood became infatuated with them.
Her relationship with men was not particularly complicated. They wanted to sleep with her, and she was rather indifferent as to whether she slept with them or not. When we had first met, I’d “seduced” her while blinded by her glamour and allurement. It was only after we were entangled that I realized that all of that was only skin deep.
“By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.”
She had leaned on one elbow and shared that revelation with me. Her hair was still rummaged from my fingers. Her lipstick was smeared from my lips. There was something gone from her. The worms in her head had eaten into the core of her. The flame that had made her a star was nothing, but ashes. I left her with vestiges of misery clinging to me as if I’d been tainted by her own unhappiness.
But we remained friends.
I worried about her and worried about myself whenever I knew I had to see her. Things weren’t going well with her husband, Carter, or with her other lovers for that matter. They all were finding it harder to find the woman that first made them want her. Her mantra of late was: “I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
Her circle of friends continued to take her calls because we were all afraid that by not answering we might be putting her life in danger. Someone so miserable had to be suicidal. It was like a guillotine hanging over all of us, waiting for her to decide when and how. It was frustrating to see someone who had been given so much not being able to find any way to enjoy the life that many desired.
I’d been drinking one night after losing yet another part that would have insured many years of future success when she called. Her unhappiness fueled the fire of my own dejection. I heard myself scream into the phone, “For all our sakes just get it over with.” I’d slammed the phone down and poured myself a couple of fingers more of scotch. I couldn’t afford to know Maria anymore. It was too debilitating, too disheartening, and inspired too many ugly thoughts of resentment. I wanted her melancholy to be left to song.
Remorse wrapped crumpled newsprint around all my further thoughts.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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Joan Didion
Whenever Maria called, it was as if the ringing of the phone heralded the end of any conviviality I might have been harboring. I always had the impression when I talked with her that the Fun to Be Around Maria was dying in another room, and all I was left with was the beautiful corpse.
She was beautiful. Even though we had all seen changes to her appearance recently. So beautiful, in fact, she could still get acting jobs without too much trouble. I could see this all ending soon because she was so morose that her mood permeated the whole movie set. She had become so lost, so indifferent to everything. She was a zombie, long before Hollywood became infatuated with them.
Her relationship with men was not particularly complicated. They wanted to sleep with her, and she was rather indifferent as to whether she slept with them or not. When we had first met, I’d “seduced” her while blinded by her glamour and allurement. It was only after we were entangled that I realized that all of that was only skin deep.
“By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.”
She had leaned on one elbow and shared that revelation with me. Her hair was still rummaged from my fingers. Her lipstick was smeared from my lips. There was something gone from her. The worms in her head had eaten into the core of her. The flame that had made her a star was nothing, but ashes. I left her with vestiges of misery clinging to me as if I’d been tainted by her own unhappiness.
But we remained friends.
I worried about her and worried about myself whenever I knew I had to see her. Things weren’t going well with her husband, Carter, or with her other lovers for that matter. They all were finding it harder to find the woman that first made them want her. Her mantra of late was: “I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
Her circle of friends continued to take her calls because we were all afraid that by not answering we might be putting her life in danger. Someone so miserable had to be suicidal. It was like a guillotine hanging over all of us, waiting for her to decide when and how. It was frustrating to see someone who had been given so much not being able to find any way to enjoy the life that many desired.
I’d been drinking one night after losing yet another part that would have insured many years of future success when she called. Her unhappiness fueled the fire of my own dejection. I heard myself scream into the phone, “For all our sakes just get it over with.” I’d slammed the phone down and poured myself a couple of fingers more of scotch. I couldn’t afford to know Maria anymore. It was too debilitating, too disheartening, and inspired too many ugly thoughts of resentment. I wanted her melancholy to be left to song.
Remorse wrapped crumpled newsprint around all my further thoughts.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
March 12, 2024
Don't quite know how she did it, but it's rare I come across a novel that I found so alienating and distant, yet so warm at the same time. Didion's Play it as it lays which takes place across Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert, and Las Vegas is full of excess truths that dart across its pages more like a prophecy.
Didion opens proceedings in not the greatest of places one would want to be - a mental institution, with a not unfamiliar piece of wisdom that sometimes the people on the inside are sometimes wiser than the people on the outside. Maria, an ex-model & Actress, a sort of anti���heroine, is the main point of interest throughout the novel, actually, going one step further - she is the novel. Even though she is an expert on feeling and being nothing, and coming from nowhere (well, of course she comes from somewhere, that would be Silver Wells, Nevada). With a non-linear narrative, we observe parts of Maria’s life in flashback, seeing certain things in real time leads her to grab hold of the happy moments from another time and place.
She is a burnt‐out case and that's putting it mildly. Maria goes through the motions of continual emptiness, she tries to keep her career alive after starring in two films directed by her estranged husband, Carter Lang , but she is rarely clear headed. Maria goes to parties and is easy prey for anyone who wants to bed her, and even has a casual affair with a friend's husband. The bulk of the story basically follows Maria on a sad downward spiral that eventually leads to........? not too sure.....a kind of wisdom I suppose.
But then this is never really a novel with any concrete conclusions, lots of things are left hanging in the balance, and I think it's all the better for it.
Didion shows us how someone deals with their own disintegration, although Maria is constantly in denial that things are falling apart, she races around the freeways driving at high speed to at least keep her reflexes and attention in tact, but living on a cocktail of drugs just to get through the day shows a woman continually battling the demons within.
Through the fog, there is actually a high intelligence in her observations and connections. She uses the language with the ease, control, and virtuosity, that comes from a natural grace. When Maria speaks of her little daughter with an unspecified mental imbalance, what might have been sentimental garbage, is so powerfully moving and so true.
Reading of a young woman wanting to destroy herself was never going to be comfortable, and it isn't. Didion's searing take on Hollywood is as unforgiving as the showbiz world itself. Bleak, sometimes harrowing, poignant, but always engrossing, I found this to be one of the most realistic pieces of fiction from a woman's point of view I have ever read. Others have said it's a bad novel by a really good non-fiction writer, like it was written out of a lazy insufficient impulse by someone who doesn't know how to handle all that talent and skill in a novel. I have to disagree. It's written in this specific way - i.e that distant feel - for a reason. The novel is going to stay with me for a very long time, and I'll no doubt read it again.
The fact I hadn't read an American novel for God knows how long also helped, as it was like re-discovering life across the pond all over again.
April 11, 2024
“what makes iago evil? some people ask. i never ask.”
devastatingly nihilistic and fast paced, play it as it lays begins at a psychiatric hospital, where maria, the main character is institutionalized. the postmodern classic follows along this line, as it depicts maria’s mental spiral into self destruction, drugs, and apathy.
maria’s life is bleak and complicated. her acting career is almost nonexistent. her husband left her. she lives and depends on barbiturates. she is terrifyingly cynical and fatalistic, which shows brilliantly through the hypnotic and almost hallucinatory vignettes that the plot is told in.
didion keeps readers captivated by changing the setting multiple times, from los angeles, to las vegas, to the mojave desert. although the plot is loosely tied together and at times confusing, didion’s signature sharp wit and beautiful writing kept my eyes glued to the pages.
reading this book was bleak and harrowing, especially through the eyes of maria. maria’s mind is submerged in layers of numbness and detachment, and reading about her felt alienating and claustrophobic at the same time. not only does she spiral internally, she spirals externally, as she is abused by the people closest to her. she dissociates by driving aimlessly on california freeways.
as described in the synopsis, play it as it lays not only depicts one woman’s spiral, but the counterculture and ennui of an entire generation in postwar america. the 1960s is popularly perceived as the heyday of american drug culture, especially for the upper and middle class, which can be seen through the narrative.
like the first line, the black and white distinction of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ or moral compasses are set aside, as every character is unlikeable and morally ambiguous. however, she makes maria’s story and narrative (as well as other characters’) so haunting with her typical eloquent and visually stimulating prose. this entire book just felt like a kick in the gut for me. the prose is simple and unadorned, but it hurts to read.
this has haunted me since i closed the book for the first time.
⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻
mini review
i have not stopped thinking of this book for a good month
November 9, 2022
La realidad de las mujeres, el mundo de las apariencias, la amoralidad, el egoísmo social… Esto es lo que se destaca en la contraportada del libro y, aunque todo ello es verdad y es importante, no es ni mucho menos lo esencial.
Lo esencial es la persona y la personalidad de María Wyeth, protagonista indiscutible de la novela, y, cómo no, la manera genial en la que nos es presentada. Pocas veces me he encontrado una relación tan íntima entre la forma y el fondo. Tanto la estructura del texto como el estilo de la escritura juegan como símbolos del estado en el que se encuentra María.
La más clara de estas relaciones se establece entre la frialdad, la distancia, la falta de emoción que caracteriza toda la prosa y la aparente indiferencia y exasperante pasividad con la que María afronta el desastre que es su vida, su desintegración. Una mujer anulada por los fuertes personajes masculinos por los que se ve atraída, abatida por los sentimientos de culpa que le suscita su hija retrasada, atormentada por el aborto que se siente obligada a practicar. Una mujer con un divorcio a sus espaldas, un amante casado y una carrera frustrada de actriz y modelo de segunda fila. Una mujer incapaz de tomar una decisión y con un profundo sentimiento de soledad y hastío en un ambiente marcado por las drogas, el sexo y el poder de la apariencia. Una mujer que a la pregunta de por qué continúa en el juego, metáfora del fatalismo y el azar que preside la vida, responde con un escueto ¿Por qué no? que la salva de la muerte pero que no la capacita para la vida.
"Solía hacer preguntas, y tuve la respuesta: nada. La respuesta es NADA"
Una NADA mental como anestésico contra la vida y también una NADA como fundamento de un nihilismo conciliador representada en los silencios que pueblan los breves, a veces brevísimos, capítulos en los que se estructura la novela. Saltos temporales sin anuncio previo, capítulos que llegan a parecer inconclusos, diálogos en apariencia banales, escenas que pueden parecer gratuitas, ausencia de explicaciones. Excepto en los tres breves e introductorios capítulos iniciales, nunca sabemos qué piensan los personajes, todo ha de ser construido y completado por el lector a partir de los gestos, los diálogos, los silencios. Todo se cuenta más allá de lo que se dice. Formas y modos que representan a la perfección la fragmentación y el desorden que preside la mente y la vida de su protagonista.
Quizás porque las tres son autoras no muy conocidas o quizás porque a las protagonistas de sus historias les define la fragilidad y la atracción del abismo o quizás porque tengo muy reciente el impacto que sus lecturas me causaron, y a pesar de que las tres poseen estilos radicalmente distintos, el caso es que he estado leyendo la magistral novela de esta mujer siempre con la mente puesta en otras dos, Lucia Berlin y Elizabeth Smart.
“Maria nunca ha entendido la amistad, la conversación, las amenidades normales del trato social. A María le cuesta hablar con gente con la que no se acuesta.”
August 18, 2024
reread: just so good i love a nihilistic summer read.
——————
through hazy vignettes and tightly controlled prose, play it as it lays tells the story of one woman’s downward spiral in late 60s los angeles. recently divorced from her film producer husband, estranged from her institutionalised daughter, and out of work from acting, maria’s life is stuck in a limbo of alienation, loneliness, and chronic desolation. what follows is a searing portrait of american life and the female experience in the 1960s, an era characterised by its severe limitations placed on women’s autonomy.
the book is, in didion’s own words, exploring a character who is ‘coming to terms with the meaninglessness of experience’. recalling the teachings of her father, maria lethargically drifts in and out of her world with the perspective that life is nothing but a game - a game she nihilistically accepts she will never win, but a game she continues to play nonetheless. disillusioned and detached from every aspect of her life, maria’s only semblance of control comes from her daily drives on the california freeway, a clear metaphor for her attempts to escape a directionless and empty life.
it is unequivocally an american novel, perfectly exemplifying the burnt-out cultural wasteland of 1960s california and its ennui. although didion worked on this book for years, play it as lays feels bound by its cultural context at its time of publication in 1970, capturing the californian malaise after the violent end to the summer of 1969 with the tate–labianca murders.
i had only ever read didion’s non-fiction before this and despite owning this book for a while, i seemed to keep putting it off because of the fear that her foray into fiction may not compare. however, i now understand how wrong i was, because didion’s pen shines just as brightly in fiction as it does in non-fiction. this fictional account of maria and its cast of characters is just as compelling as didion’s usual essay subjects, with delicately crafted characters and unflinching yet also incredibly witty dialogue.
play it as it lays is bleak, nihilistic, and quite frankly depressing, but it’s worth it to experience the brilliance of joan didion’s writing once again.
—————
i am not californian or american nor was i alive in the 60s, but i just GET it
——————
through hazy vignettes and tightly controlled prose, play it as it lays tells the story of one woman’s downward spiral in late 60s los angeles. recently divorced from her film producer husband, estranged from her institutionalised daughter, and out of work from acting, maria’s life is stuck in a limbo of alienation, loneliness, and chronic desolation. what follows is a searing portrait of american life and the female experience in the 1960s, an era characterised by its severe limitations placed on women’s autonomy.
the book is, in didion’s own words, exploring a character who is ‘coming to terms with the meaninglessness of experience’. recalling the teachings of her father, maria lethargically drifts in and out of her world with the perspective that life is nothing but a game - a game she nihilistically accepts she will never win, but a game she continues to play nonetheless. disillusioned and detached from every aspect of her life, maria’s only semblance of control comes from her daily drives on the california freeway, a clear metaphor for her attempts to escape a directionless and empty life.
it is unequivocally an american novel, perfectly exemplifying the burnt-out cultural wasteland of 1960s california and its ennui. although didion worked on this book for years, play it as lays feels bound by its cultural context at its time of publication in 1970, capturing the californian malaise after the violent end to the summer of 1969 with the tate–labianca murders.
i had only ever read didion’s non-fiction before this and despite owning this book for a while, i seemed to keep putting it off because of the fear that her foray into fiction may not compare. however, i now understand how wrong i was, because didion’s pen shines just as brightly in fiction as it does in non-fiction. this fictional account of maria and its cast of characters is just as compelling as didion’s usual essay subjects, with delicately crafted characters and unflinching yet also incredibly witty dialogue.
play it as it lays is bleak, nihilistic, and quite frankly depressing, but it’s worth it to experience the brilliance of joan didion’s writing once again.
—————
i am not californian or american nor was i alive in the 60s, but i just GET it
November 4, 2022
crumbs where are theee crumbs
June 11, 2015
Joan Didion once said that writing is a hostile act. An imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.
Play It As It Lays, published in 1970, slaps down at your soul's kitchen table and announces itself, not loudly, but in a voice that crawls under your skin, not really caring whether or not you want to see anyone, and lights a cigarette. In between noxious exhales, it tells you some version of the truth.
Maria Wyeth's story, told in shifting first and close third person, is a 20th century existential tragedy, a sort of American The Stranger, in which Maria is Meursault and Los Angeles, Algiers; a psychiatric hospital stands in for a prison; there is a Nevada desert instead of a North African beach.
At thirty-one, Maria is an actress of fading relevance with an impending divorce and a beloved four-year-old daughter in a care facility for the developmentally disabled (oh, my heart stuttered at the term 'retarded' used throughout the book). No one at the institution combs Kate's hair and the sad tangles Maria tries to smooth out during her visits are somehow emblematic of the chaos in her own life.
The chaos isn't a busy one. It isn't an overflow of demands. It is the chaos of nothingness. “By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.” Maria has become paralyzed by life, by the emptiness of her career and her relationships, where friends exchange each other as lovers as often as they exchange yesterday's soiled underwear for today's clean pair. She has had her insides scraped clean of a child conceived not in love, but in desperate boredom, and that act—the back alley abortion so terribly, graphically evoked here, remember, this is the late 1960s—is the ultimate creation of empty chaos.
Maria finds solace traveling the freeways that criss-cross this City of Angels. Cruising the nothingness of the tarmac is the only time she feels safe and in control.
Yes, this is a wrenching read. But so brilliant. The multiple points-of-view are deftly handled, the lightest touch bringing in this character or that. Didion's writing, with its echoes of Hemingway and McCullers, is spare and unflinching. The chapters are short and white space is left on the page, reflecting the white space in Maria's life that she tries to fill with alcohol, sex, acting, driving.
Few novels have taken me so deeply inside one character, injecting me into her bloodstream, so that I breathe with her, see through her eyes. I love Maria, I hate her, I want to protect her, I want her out of my life.
Time has done nothing to diminish the power of Maria's story, yet Play It As It Lays is a fascinating time capsule of feminist literature. Highly recommended.
Play It As It Lays, published in 1970, slaps down at your soul's kitchen table and announces itself, not loudly, but in a voice that crawls under your skin, not really caring whether or not you want to see anyone, and lights a cigarette. In between noxious exhales, it tells you some version of the truth.
Maria Wyeth's story, told in shifting first and close third person, is a 20th century existential tragedy, a sort of American The Stranger, in which Maria is Meursault and Los Angeles, Algiers; a psychiatric hospital stands in for a prison; there is a Nevada desert instead of a North African beach.
At thirty-one, Maria is an actress of fading relevance with an impending divorce and a beloved four-year-old daughter in a care facility for the developmentally disabled (oh, my heart stuttered at the term 'retarded' used throughout the book). No one at the institution combs Kate's hair and the sad tangles Maria tries to smooth out during her visits are somehow emblematic of the chaos in her own life.
The chaos isn't a busy one. It isn't an overflow of demands. It is the chaos of nothingness. “By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.” Maria has become paralyzed by life, by the emptiness of her career and her relationships, where friends exchange each other as lovers as often as they exchange yesterday's soiled underwear for today's clean pair. She has had her insides scraped clean of a child conceived not in love, but in desperate boredom, and that act—the back alley abortion so terribly, graphically evoked here, remember, this is the late 1960s—is the ultimate creation of empty chaos.
Maria finds solace traveling the freeways that criss-cross this City of Angels. Cruising the nothingness of the tarmac is the only time she feels safe and in control.
Yes, this is a wrenching read. But so brilliant. The multiple points-of-view are deftly handled, the lightest touch bringing in this character or that. Didion's writing, with its echoes of Hemingway and McCullers, is spare and unflinching. The chapters are short and white space is left on the page, reflecting the white space in Maria's life that she tries to fill with alcohol, sex, acting, driving.
Few novels have taken me so deeply inside one character, injecting me into her bloodstream, so that I breathe with her, see through her eyes. I love Maria, I hate her, I want to protect her, I want her out of my life.
Time has done nothing to diminish the power of Maria's story, yet Play It As It Lays is a fascinating time capsule of feminist literature. Highly recommended.
March 21, 2017
All right, let's discuss...
It has been a month since I read this little ditty, and in that one month's time, it has managed to lose a star. Because honestly, I can't give a book 5 stars just because I couldn't put it down, just because it was a "quick read." If that was the standard, every Jodi Picoult book I've ever read would be given 5 stars.
When it comes down to it, while I did thoroughly enjoy this book, it isn't one that's going to stay with me through the ages. It isn't one I'm going to recommend to you or you or you. Although I'm sure you'd enjoy it. Or not.
One of my GR friends told me that this book is a favorite of The National front man/songwriter Matt Berninger (I haven't been able to find corroboration of this on the interwebs, but I'll take your word for it). Loving The National like I do, I figured I'd give it a shot.
I guess in retrospect this book feels a little self-indulgent to me. It's a story of a poor sad little actress with nothing but a lot of money and a lot of time on her hands. Ever met a beautiful girl with dead eyes and an expressionless face who doesn't care about anything or anyone? Well that's Maria Wyeth for you. Her world is a bleak one that you really shouldn't visit for very long, because she's the kind of girl who will suck the life right out of you. Unless you're a nihilist. Then you should pull up a chair and stay awhile; you'll feel right at home.
****
This has absolutely nothing to do with the book, but you should listen to it anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FIw7E...
****
March 20, 2017 - I was right. I remember nothing about this book. I should take away another star!
It has been a month since I read this little ditty, and in that one month's time, it has managed to lose a star. Because honestly, I can't give a book 5 stars just because I couldn't put it down, just because it was a "quick read." If that was the standard, every Jodi Picoult book I've ever read would be given 5 stars.
When it comes down to it, while I did thoroughly enjoy this book, it isn't one that's going to stay with me through the ages. It isn't one I'm going to recommend to you or you or you. Although I'm sure you'd enjoy it. Or not.
One of my GR friends told me that this book is a favorite of The National front man/songwriter Matt Berninger (I haven't been able to find corroboration of this on the interwebs, but I'll take your word for it). Loving The National like I do, I figured I'd give it a shot.
I guess in retrospect this book feels a little self-indulgent to me. It's a story of a poor sad little actress with nothing but a lot of money and a lot of time on her hands. Ever met a beautiful girl with dead eyes and an expressionless face who doesn't care about anything or anyone? Well that's Maria Wyeth for you. Her world is a bleak one that you really shouldn't visit for very long, because she's the kind of girl who will suck the life right out of you. Unless you're a nihilist. Then you should pull up a chair and stay awhile; you'll feel right at home.
****
This has absolutely nothing to do with the book, but you should listen to it anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FIw7E...
****
March 20, 2017 - I was right. I remember nothing about this book. I should take away another star!
June 27, 2021
Anyone still wondering why Dave Chappelle would walk out on a $50 million TV deal with Comedy Central to go into semi-retirement hasn't read Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. All the answers are here.
There is such a thing as a novel missing me at whatever point I'm at in my life. But there's also the kismet of a novel careening into me at the moment I'm crossing the same intersection the author is driving through. A month ago, I was reading an oral history of the '80s movie Masters of the Universe and in addition to insight on Dolph Lundgren or how a toy company destroys a successful product line, this comment from Chelsea Field, who played Teela in the movie, about co-star Courtney Cox stuck in my memory.
"Luck always plays a big role in everything. Being in the right place at the right time. Getting the right script for the right show. I’ll tell you something funny. This must have been a little bit after Masters. And Courtney--she and I stayed in touch--she lived in Hollywood and I lived over in Burbank. So sometimes if I had an interview over in Hollywood or Beverly Hills, I’d stop by her place and we’d read lines together. I’d go by her house and have a cup of tea before I hit my audition.
And if it was a scene where I had to muster up tears or something she’d just be looking at me like, “Oh my god, how do you do that? How do you do that, Chelsea?' And I’d look at her and I’d be like, 'you go to class. You’re welcome to come to mine. Would you like to go with me?' And literally this was her answer: 'Oh no, I just have to get lucky once.' And I’d be like, 'what? No, come to class.' And she’d be like 'No, really, I just need to get lucky once.' That was her philosophy."
Bully for Courtney Cox and Friends, but if life is a lucky bet, what happens to those who realize they don't have the energy to keep playing the game?
Joan Didion's 1970 novella Play It As It Lays doesn't try to expose the dark side of life in the fast lane with salacious melodrama or thinly veiled celebrities acting out soap opera; she let Jacqueline Susann do that. Didion implodes that live fast/die young lifestyle into a numbing entropy. The novel is centered on and sometimes narrated by a woman telling her story from a place where mental health professionals present her with inkblots and her visitors have to sign in.
My name is Maria Wyeth. That is pronounced Mar-eye-ah, to get it straight at the outset. Some people here call me "Mrs. Lang," but I never did. Age: thirty-one. Married. Divorced. One daughter, age four. (I talk about Kate to no one here. In the place where Kate is they put electrodes on her head and needles in her spine and try to figure out what went wrong.)
Maria was born and raised in Nevada, the only child of a gambling father with great expectations and big dreams in zinc mines, cattle ranches, ski resorts or motels he bought or won but that never paid off big. Maria grew up in a town her father owned called Silver Wells (pop: 28) with her mother and her father's business partner. Graduating from high school in Tonopah with her mother's looks and her father's spirit, Maria moves to New York for acting lessons.
In the beginning, Maria's gamble pays off in ways her parents could only have dreamed of. A successful modeling career segues into the lead role in a movie called Angel Beach, in which Maria played a girl raped by a motorcycle gang. The movie is a big hit. Next comes marriage to her director, an up-and-coming talent named Carter Lang, and a multitude of glamorous acquaintances, most of them toxic, including her husband's producer BZ and BZ's wife, Helene.
With a disabled daughter she cannot care for and an estranged husband away on location, Maria spends much of her time driving the freeways of Los Angeles in her Corvette. When she feels like talking, she's contradicted. She tells her agent she wants to work, he tells her she doesn't. She tells her husband she wants to give marriage another try, he tells her she doesn't act like it. Opportunities come and go. Life begins to pass Maria by while she stands watching it like a film extra.
Play It As It Lays is the first book I've read where nearly every sentence could be the first sentence of the book.
-- So they suggested that I set down the facts, and the facts are these.
-- What happened was this: I looked all right (I'm not telling you I was blessed or cursed, I'm telling a fact, I know it from all the pictures) and somebody photographed me and before long I was getting $100 an hour from the agencies and $50 from the magazines which in those days was not bad and I knew a lot of Southerners and faggots and rich boys and that was how I spent my days and nights.
-- In the first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills), Maria drove the freeway.
-- "Tell me who you've seen," she said.
-- At four that afternoon, after a day spent looking at the telephone and lighting cigarettes and putting the cigarettes out and getting glasses of water and looking at the telephone again, Maria dialed the number.
One of the pleasures in any novel is discovering an author who has possession of a skeleton key that unlocks secrets. John Steinbeck has that ability for me. So does Elmore Leonard, in more subtle and sly ways. Joan Didion, the political journalist, author, screenwriter and wife of late novelist John Gregory Dunne, taps into that reservoir of hidden currents here. Didion wasn't reporting anything new; Maria Wyeth's meltdown was preceded by many starlets of the '20s, '30s and '40s but since the publication of the novel, has recurred over and over again -- for men as well as women - on the level of a Biblical parable.
Because Play It As It Lays doesn't conform to a linear progression of cause and effect -- Maria refuses to address why the things that have happened to her happened to her -- Didion is free to roam where she pleases and strike where she pleases, jumping in at different stages in Maria's life or telling episodes from different perspectives. The novel is minimal, thrilling, brutally honest, abnormally perceptive and breathlessly good.
Anyone still wondering why Dave Chappelle would walk out on a $50 million TV deal with Comedy Central to go into semi-retirement, or what's going on in Hollywood, can get the short answer in this clip from Chappelle's visit to Inside the Actor's Studio in November 2008. Read Play It As It Lays for more details.
There is such a thing as a novel missing me at whatever point I'm at in my life. But there's also the kismet of a novel careening into me at the moment I'm crossing the same intersection the author is driving through. A month ago, I was reading an oral history of the '80s movie Masters of the Universe and in addition to insight on Dolph Lundgren or how a toy company destroys a successful product line, this comment from Chelsea Field, who played Teela in the movie, about co-star Courtney Cox stuck in my memory.
"Luck always plays a big role in everything. Being in the right place at the right time. Getting the right script for the right show. I’ll tell you something funny. This must have been a little bit after Masters. And Courtney--she and I stayed in touch--she lived in Hollywood and I lived over in Burbank. So sometimes if I had an interview over in Hollywood or Beverly Hills, I’d stop by her place and we’d read lines together. I’d go by her house and have a cup of tea before I hit my audition.
And if it was a scene where I had to muster up tears or something she’d just be looking at me like, “Oh my god, how do you do that? How do you do that, Chelsea?' And I’d look at her and I’d be like, 'you go to class. You’re welcome to come to mine. Would you like to go with me?' And literally this was her answer: 'Oh no, I just have to get lucky once.' And I’d be like, 'what? No, come to class.' And she’d be like 'No, really, I just need to get lucky once.' That was her philosophy."
Bully for Courtney Cox and Friends, but if life is a lucky bet, what happens to those who realize they don't have the energy to keep playing the game?
Joan Didion's 1970 novella Play It As It Lays doesn't try to expose the dark side of life in the fast lane with salacious melodrama or thinly veiled celebrities acting out soap opera; she let Jacqueline Susann do that. Didion implodes that live fast/die young lifestyle into a numbing entropy. The novel is centered on and sometimes narrated by a woman telling her story from a place where mental health professionals present her with inkblots and her visitors have to sign in.
My name is Maria Wyeth. That is pronounced Mar-eye-ah, to get it straight at the outset. Some people here call me "Mrs. Lang," but I never did. Age: thirty-one. Married. Divorced. One daughter, age four. (I talk about Kate to no one here. In the place where Kate is they put electrodes on her head and needles in her spine and try to figure out what went wrong.)
Maria was born and raised in Nevada, the only child of a gambling father with great expectations and big dreams in zinc mines, cattle ranches, ski resorts or motels he bought or won but that never paid off big. Maria grew up in a town her father owned called Silver Wells (pop: 28) with her mother and her father's business partner. Graduating from high school in Tonopah with her mother's looks and her father's spirit, Maria moves to New York for acting lessons.
In the beginning, Maria's gamble pays off in ways her parents could only have dreamed of. A successful modeling career segues into the lead role in a movie called Angel Beach, in which Maria played a girl raped by a motorcycle gang. The movie is a big hit. Next comes marriage to her director, an up-and-coming talent named Carter Lang, and a multitude of glamorous acquaintances, most of them toxic, including her husband's producer BZ and BZ's wife, Helene.
With a disabled daughter she cannot care for and an estranged husband away on location, Maria spends much of her time driving the freeways of Los Angeles in her Corvette. When she feels like talking, she's contradicted. She tells her agent she wants to work, he tells her she doesn't. She tells her husband she wants to give marriage another try, he tells her she doesn't act like it. Opportunities come and go. Life begins to pass Maria by while she stands watching it like a film extra.
Play It As It Lays is the first book I've read where nearly every sentence could be the first sentence of the book.
-- So they suggested that I set down the facts, and the facts are these.
-- What happened was this: I looked all right (I'm not telling you I was blessed or cursed, I'm telling a fact, I know it from all the pictures) and somebody photographed me and before long I was getting $100 an hour from the agencies and $50 from the magazines which in those days was not bad and I knew a lot of Southerners and faggots and rich boys and that was how I spent my days and nights.
-- In the first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills), Maria drove the freeway.
-- "Tell me who you've seen," she said.
-- At four that afternoon, after a day spent looking at the telephone and lighting cigarettes and putting the cigarettes out and getting glasses of water and looking at the telephone again, Maria dialed the number.
One of the pleasures in any novel is discovering an author who has possession of a skeleton key that unlocks secrets. John Steinbeck has that ability for me. So does Elmore Leonard, in more subtle and sly ways. Joan Didion, the political journalist, author, screenwriter and wife of late novelist John Gregory Dunne, taps into that reservoir of hidden currents here. Didion wasn't reporting anything new; Maria Wyeth's meltdown was preceded by many starlets of the '20s, '30s and '40s but since the publication of the novel, has recurred over and over again -- for men as well as women - on the level of a Biblical parable.
Because Play It As It Lays doesn't conform to a linear progression of cause and effect -- Maria refuses to address why the things that have happened to her happened to her -- Didion is free to roam where she pleases and strike where she pleases, jumping in at different stages in Maria's life or telling episodes from different perspectives. The novel is minimal, thrilling, brutally honest, abnormally perceptive and breathlessly good.
Anyone still wondering why Dave Chappelle would walk out on a $50 million TV deal with Comedy Central to go into semi-retirement, or what's going on in Hollywood, can get the short answer in this clip from Chappelle's visit to Inside the Actor's Studio in November 2008. Read Play It As It Lays for more details.
April 4, 2022
Update 12/23/21: RIP Joan Didion
Maria is running from bad thoughts and memories, and she spends many of her days just driving all over southern California in her Corvette to lose herself. She is just going through the motions, engaging in meaningless sex, drinking, and drugs to try to dull the pain and stop the nightmares. Maria yearns to spend more time with her 4-year-old daughter, Kate, who’s never shown and is institutionalized with some type of disability, and it’s pretty damn clear that they’re never going to be together in the way she wants. Maria’s been broken by life, by the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse she has suffered at the hands of every single person around her, each of whom is somehow more selfish and awful than the last. The central event of the novel is Maria being pressured into getting a depressingly accurate pre-Roe back room abortion she doesn’t want. Yet, somehow, Maria goes on, which may be even more depressing than if she’d just given up:
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.Play It As It Lays is the story of Maria Wyeth, a 31-year-old former actress, recently divorced from a Hollywood director, Carter Lang. At the novel’s opening, Maria is in some kind of institution. The rest of the novel, through an almost stream-of-consciousness series of flashbacks, tells how she got there. And how Maria got there is a special kind of dark. I mean, blindfolded at midnight during an eclipse dark.
…
Maria had an abrupt conviction that the plants were consuming the oxygen she needed to breathe.
…
It occurred to Maria that whatever arrangements were made, they worked less well for women.
…
Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.
…
My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.
Maria is running from bad thoughts and memories, and she spends many of her days just driving all over southern California in her Corvette to lose herself. She is just going through the motions, engaging in meaningless sex, drinking, and drugs to try to dull the pain and stop the nightmares. Maria yearns to spend more time with her 4-year-old daughter, Kate, who’s never shown and is institutionalized with some type of disability, and it’s pretty damn clear that they’re never going to be together in the way she wants. Maria’s been broken by life, by the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse she has suffered at the hands of every single person around her, each of whom is somehow more selfish and awful than the last. The central event of the novel is Maria being pressured into getting a depressingly accurate pre-Roe back room abortion she doesn’t want. Yet, somehow, Maria goes on, which may be even more depressing than if she’d just given up:
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.Play It As It Lays is one of the most nihilistic books I’ve ever read, on a level with Blood Meridian and The Road. And like those classics, this novel would border on being an intolerable read if it weren’t for one fact: the writing is just brilliant, with quotable lines on almost every page. In that respect, it’s a bit like Lolita, another classic that you can’t look away from even when you should. There’s an acidic anger running through Maria’s narrative that is like the literary equivalent of the song You Oughta Know. So brace yourself, and settle in with this bleakest of depictions of the dark side of the late Sixties in America. Recommended.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.
July 25, 2024
What is it about sundrenched West Coast angst (occasionally spilling out into the Nevada desert) that keeps fascinating players and spectators alike throughout the decades?
The minute I reached the last page of this book I had to go back and start all over again. Now that I knew how this iconic 70s drama played out, I just had to examine, more attentively this time, Didion’s construction; how she had mounted her sentences, how she had managed to make the silences echo louder than all the words spoken, perhaps because they begged to be filled by the reader - and we all know how the sound of our own thoughts fills our mind more than those of anyone else’s.
In the current stifling heat of a Mediterranean July (which I frankly think is the most suitable setting for scenes apparently conceived in the same relentless conditions, an ocean and some decades away - but ok, you don’t have to migrate south in order to feel the coldness of detachment amidst the noise and the heat), in this heat that makes it so hard to concentrate, I had to start again and connect the pieces of Maria’s (pronounced Mar-eye-ah) story. How certain facts (and certain thoughts) brought her to the big, comforting, devastating “nothing” that haunts her from start to finish.
Didion was that writer who was herself haunted by the nothing she discerned in all the somethings of her immediate surroundings -and in the more distant ones, those of her era. Especially those. Her narrative style here is fragmentary and insinuating, at a time when this kind of storytelling was en vogue in the literary and movie worlds she was part of. Think late 60s early 70s films such as Klute, Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, Zabriskie Point.
At the time she was writing this, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, lived in Malibu and mingled with the Hollywood circuit making their way into the business. In fact, two years after the publication of the book they cowrote the script for the film version, and I can’t help thinking she had that in mind all along. The scenes are so cinematically written, vignettes one would think were put together in a montage room, instead of a writer’s desk.
Miraculously, the movie is available on the internet. If you are curious, you can check it out here: https://archive.org/details/PlayItAsI...
I think it hasn’t aged as well as the book, but I enjoyed it as much for its 70s aura as for its perfect casting. Maria, the disillusioned actress who sedates her depression by aimlessly driving the Californian freeways in her Corvette, not even trying to find meaning in her crumbling life, is played by Tuesday Weld, an actress whose own career and tumultuous personal life have the makings of a gripping story. But, although we don’t really know what happens to Maria beyond the last page, Ms Weld, at 81, is still around. Her story is one of survival and quite inspiring at that. I guess the lesson Maria was taught by her gambler father early on (“You call it as you see it, and stay in the action.”) wasn’t lost on her impersonator.
I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.
Gosh, I love Didion.
Lee Friedlander: America By Car, Whitney Museum of American Art
Tuesday Weld photographed by Dennis Hopper in 1965, seven years before the film, five before the book.
The minute I reached the last page of this book I had to go back and start all over again. Now that I knew how this iconic 70s drama played out, I just had to examine, more attentively this time, Didion’s construction; how she had mounted her sentences, how she had managed to make the silences echo louder than all the words spoken, perhaps because they begged to be filled by the reader - and we all know how the sound of our own thoughts fills our mind more than those of anyone else’s.
In the current stifling heat of a Mediterranean July (which I frankly think is the most suitable setting for scenes apparently conceived in the same relentless conditions, an ocean and some decades away - but ok, you don’t have to migrate south in order to feel the coldness of detachment amidst the noise and the heat), in this heat that makes it so hard to concentrate, I had to start again and connect the pieces of Maria’s (pronounced Mar-eye-ah) story. How certain facts (and certain thoughts) brought her to the big, comforting, devastating “nothing” that haunts her from start to finish.
Didion was that writer who was herself haunted by the nothing she discerned in all the somethings of her immediate surroundings -and in the more distant ones, those of her era. Especially those. Her narrative style here is fragmentary and insinuating, at a time when this kind of storytelling was en vogue in the literary and movie worlds she was part of. Think late 60s early 70s films such as Klute, Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, Zabriskie Point.
At the time she was writing this, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, lived in Malibu and mingled with the Hollywood circuit making their way into the business. In fact, two years after the publication of the book they cowrote the script for the film version, and I can’t help thinking she had that in mind all along. The scenes are so cinematically written, vignettes one would think were put together in a montage room, instead of a writer’s desk.
Miraculously, the movie is available on the internet. If you are curious, you can check it out here: https://archive.org/details/PlayItAsI...
I think it hasn’t aged as well as the book, but I enjoyed it as much for its 70s aura as for its perfect casting. Maria, the disillusioned actress who sedates her depression by aimlessly driving the Californian freeways in her Corvette, not even trying to find meaning in her crumbling life, is played by Tuesday Weld, an actress whose own career and tumultuous personal life have the makings of a gripping story. But, although we don’t really know what happens to Maria beyond the last page, Ms Weld, at 81, is still around. Her story is one of survival and quite inspiring at that. I guess the lesson Maria was taught by her gambler father early on (“You call it as you see it, and stay in the action.”) wasn’t lost on her impersonator.
I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.
Gosh, I love Didion.
Lee Friedlander: America By Car, Whitney Museum of American Art
Tuesday Weld photographed by Dennis Hopper in 1965, seven years before the film, five before the book.
July 14, 2019
2.5 ⭐️ This was my first time reading Joan Didion’s fiction, and in many ways this novel exemplifies those aspects of her writing that I have always found least compelling and, at times, even grating: the extent to which Didion is Hollywood adjacent, the ultimate New York and California insider; her predilection for name-dropping and gossip and inner circles; her inescapable elitism. The writing here is as precise as ever, but the story is all style and very little substance, following one woman’s mental breakdown to nihilistic ends. At times, Didion’s Maria Wyeth feels like a precursor to Elena Ferrante’s heroines, trying to find solid ground as the margins of her world and identity blur into catastrophe – but this novel lacks the potency and psychological complexity of Ferrante’s work. Instead, I found myself wanting to get back to Didion’s nonfiction, where her considerable gifts of observation are far better served – it seems Didion excels most when she’s working with existing material rather than relying on her own imagination. Only recommended for true Didion fans/completists.
July 5, 2021
The nihilism that clings to the protagonist Maria Wyeth throughout this book is like an oppressive coating over her whole being. Maria’s disaffection with her life and the moral ambiguity of the world she inhabits is almost too depressing to read about. Maria is incapable of connecting with anyone. You could say she is in a perpetual lock-down. To illustrate that, let me quote the last paragraph of the book:
“One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.”
“One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.”
May 24, 2016
So that she would not have to stop for food she kept a hard-boiled egg on the passenger seat of the Corvette. She could shell and eat a hard-boiled egg at seventy miles an hour (crack it on the steering wheel, never mind salt, salt bloats, no matter what happened she remembered her body).
Which author could possibly begin a novel with the words:
What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
Well surprisingly enough Joan Didion. And these words set in motion the inevitable direction that this book is going to take.
When Didion wrote this book, she was thirty-five and had moved a few years before with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, to Los Angeles where they were to spend twenty years working in the film industry;
The review on the back cover portrays quite succinctly the atmosphere of the setting of this book:
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, “Play It as It Lays” captures the mood of an entire generation, the emptiness and ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that both blisters and haunts the reader.
This was the period when the pill for contraceptive purposes had been in place for nearly a decade. This was meant to emancipate women and stop the worry of unnecessary pregnancies, however, as with many “modern” occurrences in life, problems did occur.
Maria (“that is pronounced Mar-eye-ah, to get it straight at the outset” – I love this attention to detail!) Wyeth is a thirty-one year old, somewhat failed actress, married to, and then divorced from Carter, a film director. She is indeed cool at times in trying to keep her emotions in check but nevertheless she fails miserably.
When the book begins, she is in some kind of psychiatric hospital and prior to this her friends had been so concerned for her safety, that when an intolerable situation occurred she inevitably turned up there. I found her entire lifestyle terrifying. Speed on the freeway was of major importance to her – she drove to places like someone demented, like a bat out of hell; it seemed that she had to keep the adrenaline flowing. Then her mood could unaccountably turn to another extreme with the realisation that life was futile and meant nothing. She cried a lot and on one occasion bled a lot. That was a mesmerising part of this book. Sex came and went and was all rather meaningless. The relationship with her husband Carter ended in divorce and I’m unsure who left whom but their situation was dire. Constant attempts at reconciliation failed as there was such hatred it was impossible to overcome.
There’s a rather strange relationship between Maria, Carter and BZ (bisexual movie producer, BZ -an abbreviation for benzodiazepines, sedative drugs) and his wife Helena. I was unsure what was really going on there.
Maria’s childhood was rather unusual. Her father had been a gambler, winning a town – Silver Wells - that began with twenty-eight individuals but was soon zero. As he had gambled away his Reno house, he recalled that he owned a town and so they lived there.
Kate, Maria’s four year old daughter is in a clinic with an imprecise disorder. Carter was responsible for her being there and Maria is trying to get her out. She plays only for Kate.
My feelings towards Maria and BZ changed dramatically from confusion and coldness to a sudden sense of place in regard to admiration for their identical views on existence on this earth. It could be seen that they had this kind of symbiotic relationship:
“I never expected you to fall back on style as an argument.”
“I’m not arguing.”
“I know that. You think I’d be here if I didn’t know that?”
She took his hand and held it? “Why are you here?”
“Because you and I, we know something. Because we’ve been out there where nothing is. Because I wanted – you know why.”
This novel is very symbolic with references to rattle snacks and also in the biblical sense; dreams, music and speed.
The prose throughout the novel is not only riveting reading but so stark in its intensity that it disturbed me no end. Nevertheless this has certainly put me on track to read more of Didion’s works, both fiction and non-fiction. She has such a style about her, which can indeed flow from one extreme to the other but with so much depth.
Which author could possibly begin a novel with the words:
What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
Well surprisingly enough Joan Didion. And these words set in motion the inevitable direction that this book is going to take.
When Didion wrote this book, she was thirty-five and had moved a few years before with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, to Los Angeles where they were to spend twenty years working in the film industry;
The review on the back cover portrays quite succinctly the atmosphere of the setting of this book:
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, “Play It as It Lays” captures the mood of an entire generation, the emptiness and ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that both blisters and haunts the reader.
This was the period when the pill for contraceptive purposes had been in place for nearly a decade. This was meant to emancipate women and stop the worry of unnecessary pregnancies, however, as with many “modern” occurrences in life, problems did occur.
Maria (“that is pronounced Mar-eye-ah, to get it straight at the outset” – I love this attention to detail!) Wyeth is a thirty-one year old, somewhat failed actress, married to, and then divorced from Carter, a film director. She is indeed cool at times in trying to keep her emotions in check but nevertheless she fails miserably.
When the book begins, she is in some kind of psychiatric hospital and prior to this her friends had been so concerned for her safety, that when an intolerable situation occurred she inevitably turned up there. I found her entire lifestyle terrifying. Speed on the freeway was of major importance to her – she drove to places like someone demented, like a bat out of hell; it seemed that she had to keep the adrenaline flowing. Then her mood could unaccountably turn to another extreme with the realisation that life was futile and meant nothing. She cried a lot and on one occasion bled a lot. That was a mesmerising part of this book. Sex came and went and was all rather meaningless. The relationship with her husband Carter ended in divorce and I’m unsure who left whom but their situation was dire. Constant attempts at reconciliation failed as there was such hatred it was impossible to overcome.
There’s a rather strange relationship between Maria, Carter and BZ (bisexual movie producer, BZ -an abbreviation for benzodiazepines, sedative drugs) and his wife Helena. I was unsure what was really going on there.
Maria’s childhood was rather unusual. Her father had been a gambler, winning a town – Silver Wells - that began with twenty-eight individuals but was soon zero. As he had gambled away his Reno house, he recalled that he owned a town and so they lived there.
Kate, Maria’s four year old daughter is in a clinic with an imprecise disorder. Carter was responsible for her being there and Maria is trying to get her out. She plays only for Kate.
My feelings towards Maria and BZ changed dramatically from confusion and coldness to a sudden sense of place in regard to admiration for their identical views on existence on this earth. It could be seen that they had this kind of symbiotic relationship:
“I never expected you to fall back on style as an argument.”
“I’m not arguing.”
“I know that. You think I’d be here if I didn’t know that?”
She took his hand and held it? “Why are you here?”
“Because you and I, we know something. Because we’ve been out there where nothing is. Because I wanted – you know why.”
This novel is very symbolic with references to rattle snacks and also in the biblical sense; dreams, music and speed.
The prose throughout the novel is not only riveting reading but so stark in its intensity that it disturbed me no end. Nevertheless this has certainly put me on track to read more of Didion’s works, both fiction and non-fiction. She has such a style about her, which can indeed flow from one extreme to the other but with so much depth.
December 18, 2021
Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion
Maria is the central character in this fascinating but miserable story about a young ‘wanna be’ actress married to Carter, the Director of her only two movies (one unreleased). This couple have a young daughter Kate, living in a mental institution. There’s a whole cast of unsavoury people in Maria’s life – such as her bitchy ‘friend’ Helene and her abusive husband BZ. Maria has sex with a married man, who’s child she is carrying – she is forced to have an abortion (scrape, scrape), a very unpleasant scene. Maria has an agent who seems to be the only person interested in helping her, however, his motivation is probably to protect Carter’s image. She has a creepy, disgusting neighbour and an old friend of her father’s drops into and out of her life.
This story is melancholic, dark, violent, and miserable – a stark contrasts to the glamour and faux happiness of Hollywood. Maria passively moves through this story as a lifeless, limp, victim of emotional and verbal humiliation and physical abuse. Her relationship with Carter is damaging and wretched. Her husband and her friends always seem baffled and annoyed at Maria’s lack of concern or interest in anything. She just doesn’t care. The question I have is, is this a product of her environment or was she like this anyway?
Even her time with the troubled Kate, is horrible and upsetting. To maintain some sort of structure and routine in her life, Maria drives the freeways around California, starting at the same time every day. She drives all day, in her Corvette, going nowhere in particular.
I am new to Didion, this being my first foray into her work. Thanks to GR mate Mary who also recommended I watch a documentary about her, one quickly discovers she is a fascinating free spirit who seems obsessed with the disorder and dysfunction of individuals and society. This is typified in this sad story, as we see the dismantling of Maria as she wallows in a broken world.
This passage typifies Maria’s antipathy towards everything, her penchant for doing nothing:
For the rest of the time Maria was in Las Vegas she wore dark glasses. She did not decide to stay in Vegas: she only failed to leave
Even though this part of America is sunny, I imagined this story to be in black and white – grainy at that.
Play it as it Lays is a very powerful story and it deserves to be read and re-read. There is so much more to learn about this interesting author and her work.
5-Stars
Maria is the central character in this fascinating but miserable story about a young ‘wanna be’ actress married to Carter, the Director of her only two movies (one unreleased). This couple have a young daughter Kate, living in a mental institution. There’s a whole cast of unsavoury people in Maria’s life – such as her bitchy ‘friend’ Helene and her abusive husband BZ. Maria has sex with a married man, who’s child she is carrying – she is forced to have an abortion (scrape, scrape), a very unpleasant scene. Maria has an agent who seems to be the only person interested in helping her, however, his motivation is probably to protect Carter’s image. She has a creepy, disgusting neighbour and an old friend of her father’s drops into and out of her life.
This story is melancholic, dark, violent, and miserable – a stark contrasts to the glamour and faux happiness of Hollywood. Maria passively moves through this story as a lifeless, limp, victim of emotional and verbal humiliation and physical abuse. Her relationship with Carter is damaging and wretched. Her husband and her friends always seem baffled and annoyed at Maria’s lack of concern or interest in anything. She just doesn’t care. The question I have is, is this a product of her environment or was she like this anyway?
Even her time with the troubled Kate, is horrible and upsetting. To maintain some sort of structure and routine in her life, Maria drives the freeways around California, starting at the same time every day. She drives all day, in her Corvette, going nowhere in particular.
I am new to Didion, this being my first foray into her work. Thanks to GR mate Mary who also recommended I watch a documentary about her, one quickly discovers she is a fascinating free spirit who seems obsessed with the disorder and dysfunction of individuals and society. This is typified in this sad story, as we see the dismantling of Maria as she wallows in a broken world.
This passage typifies Maria’s antipathy towards everything, her penchant for doing nothing:
For the rest of the time Maria was in Las Vegas she wore dark glasses. She did not decide to stay in Vegas: she only failed to leave
Even though this part of America is sunny, I imagined this story to be in black and white – grainy at that.
Play it as it Lays is a very powerful story and it deserves to be read and re-read. There is so much more to learn about this interesting author and her work.
5-Stars
June 13, 2024
Play It As It Lays is joan didion's successful attempt to personify nausea >:(
｡･:*˚:✧｡｡･:*˚:✧｡｡･:*˚:✧｡｡･:*˚:✧｡
imagine: you're hanging out with a stranger you thought was interesting. she's decked out in stylish, but outdated clothing and she's smoking a cigarette. then she offers for you to take a drag. you accept. but actually, the cigarette tastes disgusting and it stays in your lungs too long and you can't release the smoke and it sucks and five minutes later, you're still trying to breathe it out but you CAN’T until she finishes waffling and refusing to use question marks. this cigarette drag took two hours from your life. (aka how long it took to read this)
that was what this book felt like.
disclaimer: im just some girl with access to a keyboard. im not an intellectual, and maybe ive missed the point of the story entirely - i don’t know. all i do know is i suffered reading this. xx
╰┈➤ joan didion presents a dusty, ex-glamorous, and feverishly lukewarm setting of southern california. i think her portrayal of this scene was maybe one of the highlights of the book for me, as you can clearly see the expertise and inside knowledge of the time and area that didion transcribes within these pages.
: ̗̀➛ the plot *ੈ✩‧₊˚
play it as it lays follows maria wyeth as she spirals and loses control of her life, surrounded by assholes (including herself) and an unwillingness to try and resolve her problems. as a whole, the plot was layered and it felt like wading through a muddy river trying to keep track of it. the book uses a series of vignettes without much context to convey a storyline, but it was again, just difficult to keep track of and i def felt annoyed whilst reading it. it feels like so much but so little happened, each chapter becoming more and more claustrophobic and painful than the last.
: ̗̀➛ the characters *ੈ✩‧₊˚
╰┈➤ i hated all of them. literally . all of the women were written as shallow, and all the men were abusive shites. but they all had one thing in common: they were all aggravating, selfish, and i couldn’t root for any of them- worse, i barely cared about what happened to them.
maria was, of course, self-centred and shallow and so apathetic i wanted to shake her. girl wake up!!! im sure the point of the story was literally that. that nihilism; that apathy. but i didn’t enjoy it, and i don’t think it was done well. i had some sympathy for her, especially due to the novel’s short-term, frantic meditation on motherhood in two ways. that was maybe my other highlight of the book, because it actually made me feel her grief and her helplessness and i felt so bad for her in a way that the novel never managed to do otherwise.
carter is a twat. i hate him. he should die. same for BZ and helene.
: ̗̀➛ the writing *ੈ✩‧₊˚
╰┈➤ the book read like cardboard flavoured urban poetry. and by that i mean it was like what you’d expect to find written on the walls of a public bathroom: vague, meant to be deep but really just dumb and unintelligable, and absolutely LACKING in substance or personality (unless if you consider no personality to be one in itself).
the dialogue especially was dead and meaningless; i found myself literally rolling my eyes at some of the dumb shit they said, and how everyone was essentially the same (horrible) person. it was also extremely boring and painful to read, which i shall illustrate with a quote:
WHAT 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
genuinely it was pages and pages of this nonsense, and that’s not even mentioning the use of the f slur SO many times . like it was unnecessary. was it written in the seventies? yes. but it was excessive.
it’s hard to illustrate the blandness of the prose; it was something that just built up over the course of this novel.
the way didion writes is the actual, literal, epitome of telling and not showing. the only verb for dialogue was ‘said’ and there was no effort to embellish on any sort of description or atmosphere beyond what was… seen. it was like a telescope looking in on people’s lives.
: ̗̀➛ overall *ੈ✩‧₊˚
i don’t like this book. that much is obvious. i hated almost every aspect of it, and i hated its philosophy. i feel like i would have understood it more when i was in the worst mental stages of my life, like waaaooooow… she’s just like me fr… :3 but unfortunately for joan, i am HEALING. healing. got it?
i wouldn’t recommend if you’re in a dark place, the overtones and filter of depression on this book was so overwhelming and, not only did maria spiral, but it was as if it was going to send me to that place too because it was just so… numb.
1.5 🌟
cw: pretty graphic abortion, abuse, homophobia, drugs. lmk if i missed any!
｡･:*˚:✧｡｡･:*˚:✧｡｡･:*˚:✧｡｡･:*˚:✧｡
imagine: you're hanging out with a stranger you thought was interesting. she's decked out in stylish, but outdated clothing and she's smoking a cigarette. then she offers for you to take a drag. you accept. but actually, the cigarette tastes disgusting and it stays in your lungs too long and you can't release the smoke and it sucks and five minutes later, you're still trying to breathe it out but you CAN’T until she finishes waffling and refusing to use question marks. this cigarette drag took two hours from your life. (aka how long it took to read this)
that was what this book felt like.
disclaimer: im just some girl with access to a keyboard. im not an intellectual, and maybe ive missed the point of the story entirely - i don’t know. all i do know is i suffered reading this. xx
╰┈➤ joan didion presents a dusty, ex-glamorous, and feverishly lukewarm setting of southern california. i think her portrayal of this scene was maybe one of the highlights of the book for me, as you can clearly see the expertise and inside knowledge of the time and area that didion transcribes within these pages.
: ̗̀➛ the plot *ੈ✩‧₊˚
play it as it lays follows maria wyeth as she spirals and loses control of her life, surrounded by assholes (including herself) and an unwillingness to try and resolve her problems. as a whole, the plot was layered and it felt like wading through a muddy river trying to keep track of it. the book uses a series of vignettes without much context to convey a storyline, but it was again, just difficult to keep track of and i def felt annoyed whilst reading it. it feels like so much but so little happened, each chapter becoming more and more claustrophobic and painful than the last.
: ̗̀➛ the characters *ੈ✩‧₊˚
╰┈➤ i hated all of them. literally . all of the women were written as shallow, and all the men were abusive shites. but they all had one thing in common: they were all aggravating, selfish, and i couldn’t root for any of them- worse, i barely cared about what happened to them.
maria was, of course, self-centred and shallow and so apathetic i wanted to shake her. girl wake up!!! im sure the point of the story was literally that. that nihilism; that apathy. but i didn’t enjoy it, and i don’t think it was done well. i had some sympathy for her, especially due to the novel’s short-term, frantic meditation on motherhood in two ways. that was maybe my other highlight of the book, because it actually made me feel her grief and her helplessness and i felt so bad for her in a way that the novel never managed to do otherwise.
carter is a twat. i hate him. he should die. same for BZ and helene.
: ̗̀➛ the writing *ੈ✩‧₊˚
╰┈➤ the book read like cardboard flavoured urban poetry. and by that i mean it was like what you’d expect to find written on the walls of a public bathroom: vague, meant to be deep but really just dumb and unintelligable, and absolutely LACKING in substance or personality (unless if you consider no personality to be one in itself).
the dialogue especially was dead and meaningless; i found myself literally rolling my eyes at some of the dumb shit they said, and how everyone was essentially the same (horrible) person. it was also extremely boring and painful to read, which i shall illustrate with a quote:
“That was edifying,” Carter said. “Why’d you do it.”
“I just did it.”
“I want you to give that gun back to Farris.”
“I already did.”
“I don’t want any guns around here.”
Maria looked at him. “Neither do I,” she said.
WHAT 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
genuinely it was pages and pages of this nonsense, and that’s not even mentioning the use of the f slur SO many times . like it was unnecessary. was it written in the seventies? yes. but it was excessive.
it’s hard to illustrate the blandness of the prose; it was something that just built up over the course of this novel.
the way didion writes is the actual, literal, epitome of telling and not showing. the only verb for dialogue was ‘said’ and there was no effort to embellish on any sort of description or atmosphere beyond what was… seen. it was like a telescope looking in on people’s lives.
: ̗̀➛ overall *ੈ✩‧₊˚
i don’t like this book. that much is obvious. i hated almost every aspect of it, and i hated its philosophy. i feel like i would have understood it more when i was in the worst mental stages of my life, like waaaooooow… she’s just like me fr… :3 but unfortunately for joan, i am HEALING. healing. got it?
i wouldn’t recommend if you’re in a dark place, the overtones and filter of depression on this book was so overwhelming and, not only did maria spiral, but it was as if it was going to send me to that place too because it was just so… numb.
1.5 🌟
cw: pretty graphic abortion, abuse, homophobia, drugs. lmk if i missed any!
October 25, 2023
Are writers born or made? Usually I would say that they are mostly made or it’s a mixture of both: one has to possess a certain talent, but it requires a lot of hard work to harness that talent, that passion, those skills, those experiences, what have you.
Reading Play It As It Lays and watching a documentary about Joan Didion, this writer’s case might almost make me think otherwise - her talent seems incredibly effortless. With Didion’s natural observation skills, she wrote from an early age and when it came to winning prestigious internships and publishing articles in important magazines she made it seem like there is nothing to it. Even off duty, she kept on working and writing, that’s what she was and what she did. She might be an epitome of natural writing talent, but it is her dedication to writing which I find truly astonishing. To be a writer, you must write.
In Play It As It Lays we find aspiring actress Maria stuck in a vicious circle which coils around her like a snake. If you don’t play the game, life will spit you out.
I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?
↑Marcel Duchamp playing chess with nude Eve Babitz, 1963. Maria, is that you? Later Babitz wrote about this experience in Esquire.
Even though Maria knows the rules and holds all the aces, it is a game of minor roles, party girls, abusive partners, drugs and abortions. Set in the 60s’ California and hiding behind a simple premise of a Hollywood Dream narrative gone sour, it’s a devastating portrayal of a woman’s fall into madness, decadence and self-destruction. Well, almost - an outrageous indifference becomes Maria’s suit of armour, mastering “nothing” becomes her salvation.
I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.
But, does “nothing” last forever?
There is a certain sense of beauty and nostalgia in the details of the times Didion depicts in this novel, yet I feel she does so not in order to romanticize the decadence, but bring all its undercurrents: misogyny, homophobia, inequality, ennui and despair contrasting with the flashy world of promised dreams.
↑Female bodies as Living Paintbrushes in Yves Klein’s live musical art performance, 1960.
Didion’s prose is not exactly austere, but it does feel emotionally detached and, at the same time, highly allusive. I’d say there is a rare combination of both detachment and empathy in her work.
On the surface, the composition of Play It As It Lays seems rather minimalistic or even beyond minimalistic. Moreover, there is an interesting play of positive and negative, a sort of re-definition of what could be considered positive or negative. Sometimes in painting or even photography, we can find a negative space or an empty space which is not just a mere background - it can be perceived as a positive agent, just as important as what could be considered a subject. It reminded me of yohaku no bi, “beauty of empty space” in Japanese. I think it’s quite unlikely that Didion was inspired by it, yet the concept of empty space present in this novel is of a similar nature. It is possible to find this idea in other arts and fields, another example in music, where a pause, an interval or a silence can be equally important. And in this case with the written word - it takes a rare talent to pull it off. Well, Didion succeeds quite masterfully - in Play It As It Lays a space of “nothingness” in between and within the text has a voice of its own.
↑My Work is My Body, My Body is My Work, Helena Almeida, first solo exhibition in 1967
This is my second Didion (and happens to be the third book with serpent allusions this year!), so I’m excited there are some more of her works to look forward to. Play It As It Lays is a piece which will stay with me for a long time and I can imagine myself re-reading it in the future.
All the stars, Joan.
Reading Play It As It Lays and watching a documentary about Joan Didion, this writer’s case might almost make me think otherwise - her talent seems incredibly effortless. With Didion’s natural observation skills, she wrote from an early age and when it came to winning prestigious internships and publishing articles in important magazines she made it seem like there is nothing to it. Even off duty, she kept on working and writing, that’s what she was and what she did. She might be an epitome of natural writing talent, but it is her dedication to writing which I find truly astonishing. To be a writer, you must write.
In Play It As It Lays we find aspiring actress Maria stuck in a vicious circle which coils around her like a snake. If you don’t play the game, life will spit you out.
I mean maybe I was holding all of the aces, but what was the game?
↑Marcel Duchamp playing chess with nude Eve Babitz, 1963. Maria, is that you? Later Babitz wrote about this experience in Esquire.
Even though Maria knows the rules and holds all the aces, it is a game of minor roles, party girls, abusive partners, drugs and abortions. Set in the 60s’ California and hiding behind a simple premise of a Hollywood Dream narrative gone sour, it’s a devastating portrayal of a woman’s fall into madness, decadence and self-destruction. Well, almost - an outrageous indifference becomes Maria’s suit of armour, mastering “nothing” becomes her salvation.
I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.
But, does “nothing” last forever?
There is a certain sense of beauty and nostalgia in the details of the times Didion depicts in this novel, yet I feel she does so not in order to romanticize the decadence, but bring all its undercurrents: misogyny, homophobia, inequality, ennui and despair contrasting with the flashy world of promised dreams.
↑Female bodies as Living Paintbrushes in Yves Klein’s live musical art performance, 1960.
Didion’s prose is not exactly austere, but it does feel emotionally detached and, at the same time, highly allusive. I’d say there is a rare combination of both detachment and empathy in her work.
On the surface, the composition of Play It As It Lays seems rather minimalistic or even beyond minimalistic. Moreover, there is an interesting play of positive and negative, a sort of re-definition of what could be considered positive or negative. Sometimes in painting or even photography, we can find a negative space or an empty space which is not just a mere background - it can be perceived as a positive agent, just as important as what could be considered a subject. It reminded me of yohaku no bi, “beauty of empty space” in Japanese. I think it’s quite unlikely that Didion was inspired by it, yet the concept of empty space present in this novel is of a similar nature. It is possible to find this idea in other arts and fields, another example in music, where a pause, an interval or a silence can be equally important. And in this case with the written word - it takes a rare talent to pull it off. Well, Didion succeeds quite masterfully - in Play It As It Lays a space of “nothingness” in between and within the text has a voice of its own.
↑My Work is My Body, My Body is My Work, Helena Almeida, first solo exhibition in 1967
This is my second Didion (and happens to be the third book with serpent allusions this year!), so I’m excited there are some more of her works to look forward to. Play It As It Lays is a piece which will stay with me for a long time and I can imagine myself re-reading it in the future.
All the stars, Joan.
September 26, 2016
Gambling, domestic violence, sexual abuse, drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, insanity, depression, snakes, suicide. These are all elements of Play It As It Lays, and much, much more. This is stark, wide-eyed, slap in the face prose that grabs the reader and holds you from beginning to end. It's not a pleasant read, no way. Watching Maria Wyeth's life unfold is like watching the proverbial train wreck that you can't look away from. Set in the 1960's, it's about Hollywood and the movie industry; it's about Las Vegas and gambling; but mostly it's about the life of a not so famous actress who is lost in the darkest corners of these places, and in the darkest corners of life. Joan Didion is at her best here, the writing is superb and it's definitely worthy of being called a modern classic. 4.5 stars.
December 23, 2021
Writing is a hostile act, says Joan Didion, not in this book, just generally, that's a thing she says. She clarifies in this terrific interview:
So here she is wrenching around your mind in a basically hostile bummer of a book. Her lead, Maria, lives permanently at rock bottom - high, promiscuous, desperately low on self-esteem and purpose. She seems perpetually one step away from giving up, but the thing about her is that she abides. She's like an empty shell caught in the surf: helpless, battered against rocks with every swell, somehow never breaking. Her ex bullies her into but she still abides.
The one thing she cares about is her daughter Kate, and what even is wrong with Kate? She's hospitalized and on methylphenidate hydrochloride, that's like our only clue; that turns out to be Ritalin, which was used to treat depression in 1960. Kate's four, I think, which seems early for depression. I don't know what her damage is.
Maria's an unforgettable, unique character. In the end she makes her only active decision of the book, passively: She lives on the edge of the abyss, eyes locked into the void. "I used to ask questions," she says, "and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is 'nothing.'" This book is something, though. I loved it.
It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way.
So here she is wrenching around your mind in a basically hostile bummer of a book. Her lead, Maria, lives permanently at rock bottom - high, promiscuous, desperately low on self-esteem and purpose. She seems perpetually one step away from giving up, but the thing about her is that she abides. She's like an empty shell caught in the surf: helpless, battered against rocks with every swell, somehow never breaking. Her ex bullies her into but she still abides.
The one thing she cares about is her daughter Kate, and what even is wrong with Kate? She's hospitalized and on methylphenidate hydrochloride, that's like our only clue; that turns out to be Ritalin, which was used to treat depression in 1960. Kate's four, I think, which seems early for depression. I don't know what her damage is.
Maria's an unforgettable, unique character. In the end she makes her only active decision of the book, passively: She lives on the edge of the abyss, eyes locked into the void. "I used to ask questions," she says, "and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is 'nothing.'" This book is something, though. I loved it.
April 25, 2008
When I finished reading this book the other day, I suddenly realized that I hadn't really appreciated it correctly. That I needed to reread it right away because I hadn't read it the right way and because there is a lot that you don't have enough information to make sense of the first time around.
I don't understand how people can call this book cold and sterile. I just thought it was so rich and textured and heartbreaking. I feel like the little chapters are like puzzle pieces and each piece is a sort of tone poem or a meditation or an evocation and when you place the pieces together what's between the pieces is just about devastating.
***
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.
I don't understand how people can call this book cold and sterile. I just thought it was so rich and textured and heartbreaking. I feel like the little chapters are like puzzle pieces and each piece is a sort of tone poem or a meditation or an evocation and when you place the pieces together what's between the pieces is just about devastating.
***
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.
February 8, 2022
Always when I play back my father's voice it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don't do it the hard way... I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and I keep on playing.
This novel from Didion goes way beyond bleak into nihilism, but with just that touch of almost despairing stoicism that keeps Maria from the ultimate self-destruction. Or is it that even killing herself is too active a decision for Maria to be able to make? First published in 1970, it offers up a stark portrait of an America that belies all the flower-power optimism we associate with California in the 1960s.
Set against a backdrop of Hollywood, sun, Las Vegas and the Nevada desert, this feels utterly contemporary from Didion's pared back, bruising prose, to the self-alienated women playing the modelling/acting/party-girl games, directed by powerful men who hold the chips and who dish out film parts and jewellery as pacifiers.
The discussions of mental health and illegal abortion must have been more shocking at the time than they are now, though Didion uses them powerfully to indict a culture that looks as if it is booming (fast cars, highways, flashy restaurants, big houses, expensive hotels and casinos) but which is shown to be emotionally hollow and worthless beyond a material sense. As readers today, we're also aware of Vietnam hovering over the story.
The typography, with its short chapters and paragraphs stranded on white pages, echoes the empty spaces of the story, making this a fast read but a deeply affecting one. File it on your bookshelves after The Great Gatsby and The Bell Jar.
June 14, 2020
Well, now I know where Brett Easton Ellis got the inspiration for "Less Than Zero". Except Joan Didion is a much, much better writer than him.
May 20, 2009
Recently my five y/o daughter caught the first minute of the "Thriller" video. I say the first minute because upon seeing Michael look up at the camera with yellow eyes and fangs she threw her hands up, screamed at the top of her lungs, ran from the room, into her room, ran back into the room (still screaming), out of the room, back in and buried her head into the safety of my comforting lap (still screaming).
Now I realize this is most people's reaction to seeing Micheal's post '90s decomposing flesh face but for the little princess it was a little traumatizing. Since the "day o' horror" I have had to create a new "pretty" story every night "to get THAT face" out of her head. I've created my own little fantasy stories, catered to the princess, filled with violet unicorns, fairy wings, rainbows and on one interesting night a humpback whale, mermaid and her own underwater kingdom.
These tales of bubble-gum and rainbows brought me to this book. Sometimes when life is filled with demonic faces that haunt your night you need the pretty stories to even it out. OR in adult-land when life is filled with beige and blah you need this book.
It was achingly empty and dark. The depravity of the characters brought out feelings and emotions within me that I needed to feel. It was rich with the feelings that make you feel alive just by your own juxtaposition to the toxic characters. Reading this was akin to reading an Adrienne Rich poem. I really liked it.
"I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing."
Now I realize this is most people's reaction to seeing Micheal's post '90s decomposing flesh face but for the little princess it was a little traumatizing. Since the "day o' horror" I have had to create a new "pretty" story every night "to get THAT face" out of her head. I've created my own little fantasy stories, catered to the princess, filled with violet unicorns, fairy wings, rainbows and on one interesting night a humpback whale, mermaid and her own underwater kingdom.
These tales of bubble-gum and rainbows brought me to this book. Sometimes when life is filled with demonic faces that haunt your night you need the pretty stories to even it out. OR in adult-land when life is filled with beige and blah you need this book.
It was achingly empty and dark. The depravity of the characters brought out feelings and emotions within me that I needed to feel. It was rich with the feelings that make you feel alive just by your own juxtaposition to the toxic characters. Reading this was akin to reading an Adrienne Rich poem. I really liked it.
"I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing."
May 30, 2015
Joan Didion wastes no words. This novel is slim because she only says what must be said, and the reader must make the connections and draw the conclusions. It starts at the end with a few chapters from the points of view of other characters, then shifts into the story from Maria Wyeth's point of view. It is a picture of a depressed woman in a fake society, late 1960s Los Angeles and Las Vegas. An era with drugs and sex, movie stars in the desert and psychiatric hospitals for children, but no access to legal abortion.
(That requires a sidenote - is this the first novel I've read where the main character has an abortion? I can't think of another one. Isn't that strange, considering how many women have them? And since this one was under the table it was pretty difficult to read those parts, with the trauma to her body. Her psyche was already messed up.)
I had only read a few things of Didion before but I have this feeling that I will like her more and more as I age. I read The Year of Magical Thinking before I'd experienced any grief of my own. Oh how the reading experience would change just five years later. We studied the essay "The White Album" from the collection of essays The White Album when I took the creative non-fiction class and I knew I had to read more of her. She is not afraid to write what nobody else will say and she never sugar coats it.
(That requires a sidenote - is this the first novel I've read where the main character has an abortion? I can't think of another one. Isn't that strange, considering how many women have them? And since this one was under the table it was pretty difficult to read those parts, with the trauma to her body. Her psyche was already messed up.)
I had only read a few things of Didion before but I have this feeling that I will like her more and more as I age. I read The Year of Magical Thinking before I'd experienced any grief of my own. Oh how the reading experience would change just five years later. We studied the essay "The White Album" from the collection of essays The White Album when I took the creative non-fiction class and I knew I had to read more of her. She is not afraid to write what nobody else will say and she never sugar coats it.
May 8, 2020
"Just so. I am what I am. To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point."
This is a cruel book populated by cruel characters whose hearts, for the most part, stay cold and brutish even in the desert's blistering heat. I have enjoyed Didion’s essays, so I was expecting some of the themes, but I had not prepared myself for something so delirious and fragmented. I should admit that I was not always sure I knew what was going on. It is nasty and brutish, and I loved it.
The story plays out in the form of 84 snapshots, most of which are no more than a few pages long. A few are written in the first person, but most follow the tragic protagonist, Maria, in the third person, as she spins from trouble to trouble. The snapshots jump around in time, and we rarely get a clear sense of chronology. Maria spends a lot of time aimlessly driving around and the reader is likewise carted chaotically from location to location, from LA to Las Vegas to the Mojave Desert, from a psychiatric hospital to swanky bars and run-down motel rooms. A core set of characters slip in and out of Maria’s life and they remain slippery: it takes time to figure out who each of them are. We get glimpses of their own lives, but we only really see them as they exist in relation to the increasingly solipsistic Maria - mostly cajoling, commanding, bullying her.
Didion’s prose is stunning. So much remains so well unsaid. Didion can pack so much into a single short sentence:
“‘I love you,’ she whispered, but it was more a plea than a declaration and in any case he made no response.”
The fragmentation of the narrative allows us to inhabit Maria’s chaos and isolation. The sparsity of details we get regarding the people in her life - mostly via snatches of dialogue - make us feel as isolated as she is. While her destructive behaviour may frustrate us at times, it is easy to feel compassion when we see what she is up against.
This book was written before Roe v. Wade. That made much of what happens a big eye opener for me and I am sure that will stay with me always.
This is a cruel book populated by cruel characters whose hearts, for the most part, stay cold and brutish even in the desert's blistering heat. I have enjoyed Didion’s essays, so I was expecting some of the themes, but I had not prepared myself for something so delirious and fragmented. I should admit that I was not always sure I knew what was going on. It is nasty and brutish, and I loved it.
The story plays out in the form of 84 snapshots, most of which are no more than a few pages long. A few are written in the first person, but most follow the tragic protagonist, Maria, in the third person, as she spins from trouble to trouble. The snapshots jump around in time, and we rarely get a clear sense of chronology. Maria spends a lot of time aimlessly driving around and the reader is likewise carted chaotically from location to location, from LA to Las Vegas to the Mojave Desert, from a psychiatric hospital to swanky bars and run-down motel rooms. A core set of characters slip in and out of Maria’s life and they remain slippery: it takes time to figure out who each of them are. We get glimpses of their own lives, but we only really see them as they exist in relation to the increasingly solipsistic Maria - mostly cajoling, commanding, bullying her.
Didion’s prose is stunning. So much remains so well unsaid. Didion can pack so much into a single short sentence:
“‘I love you,’ she whispered, but it was more a plea than a declaration and in any case he made no response.”
The fragmentation of the narrative allows us to inhabit Maria’s chaos and isolation. The sparsity of details we get regarding the people in her life - mostly via snatches of dialogue - make us feel as isolated as she is. While her destructive behaviour may frustrate us at times, it is easy to feel compassion when we see what she is up against.
This book was written before Roe v. Wade. That made much of what happens a big eye opener for me and I am sure that will stay with me always.
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