"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 w...

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

The name of the gameNOTHING 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 Didio...

“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 DidionWhenever 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 wa...

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...

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 it's 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 somet...

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 pers...

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

Update 12/23/21: RIP Joan DidionEverything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.…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. Th...

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 Unive...

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...

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 t

Play it as it Lays by Joan DidionMaria 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 abortio...

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

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: 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, despera...

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 He...

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...

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.

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 ma

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

"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

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...

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 acc...

A beautiful book that you can finish in one sitting. However, don't read this when you are depressed because it can make you more depressed. In fact, it made me stop reading for a while because I felt so sad because I could not shake off from my mind the disheartening scenes in the book. This book that is included in the Time Magazine's 100 Best English Novels from 1923 to 2005. The book is about a 30-year old mother, Maria Wyeth who lives in the 60's America as a struggling actress. She meets a...

The first of her fiction that I’ve read, and it has the bleakly stylish pleasures I might have predicted from prior exposure to the essays – her feel for ominous banality, for the casual nihilism of the rootless (she insinuates where Isherwood rants, and beats him on the Zen of Freeways), for the grotesque contrast of a character’s obvious ongoing crack-up and the evasive, anesthetized trivialities she speaks in. Published in 1970 but feels radically spare and minimal – but I don’t know why I sa...

I remember when I read Where I Was From a couple years ago, Didion referred a lot to her novel Play It As It Lays and I thought it sounded really bad. About a year ago I found an old edition someplace with this enormous and brain-numbingly awesome picture of Didion with her cigarette and legendarily icy, ironical stare. I really came close to buying it just because of that image on the back, but then I had a real stern confrontation with myself in the used fiction aisle about the folly and immat...

You ever notice how almost every review you’ll read of a Joan Didion book calls her “intelligent,” or says that she writes “intelligent prose”? That must get to you. No wonder all of her heroines take pills.It’s true, though, she does have an awful big brain for such a little lady. And yeah, L.A. is scary, and there isn’t really anyone who conveys that better than her…except maybe Philip K. Dick, who isn’t literally writing about L.A., but come on.But, I don’t know, as good as the technique is h...

I was born and “raised” where millions came (and still come) to recreate themselves. Just a young teenager at the time Joan Didion wrote this book, its authenticity makes me ache. Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s didn’t carry the panache, political importance, or utopian dreams of coincident San Francisco. So there was little to look to for meaning, for soul. The center did not hold. Every family I knew had disintegrated, mine included. The rules, if they existed at all, were extremely fuzzy. It w...

Absolutely incredible. The picture of Los Angeles and Palm Springs and everything in between. I can’t wait to read it again. I just can’t.

‘play it as it lays’ is no more a book than an entire realm of thought. this was my first read by joan didion and i was definitely not disappointed, which is not to say i wasn’t surprised.didion’s writing is so entirely raw, so sudden and short and staccato-like that i can genuinely say i’ve never read anything like it before. this whole book seemed to have been written with the entire purpose of representing real human life and giving no information other than that absolutely necessary to the r...