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

crumbs where are theee crumbs

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.

https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...

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.

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pre-review

mental breakdown fiction >>>>>>

review to come / 4 stars

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tbr review

hot girl required reading

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.

n  n    “what makes iago evil? some people ask. i never ask.”n  n

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.

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

n  mini reviewn
i have not stopped thinking of this book for a good month

"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.

“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.”

n  n
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.

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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.

n   "Solía hacer preguntas, y tuve la respuesta: nada. La respuesta es NADA"n

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.

n   “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.” n

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.

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.

n  n

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)

Hmm. Star ratings are tricky here. I'm giving it a 3 for my own enjoyment of it, but it probably deserves a four for being so well written.

Although I didn't exactly relish this book, I did read it in one sitting. I love Joan Didion's essays, so I was excited to try a novel. But this is not really my kind of book. If you like Bret Easton Ellis novels, you'll probably love this. If you like reading about rich people wandering aimlessly through their lives and shuddering through the death throes of their emotional lives, this is the book for you. It's one of those stories where a suicide attempt or other such self-destructive act serves to remind you that the character does have some kind of feelings. I'm not saying that to be snide - I think there is something impressive about novels like that, and they are often a really skillful portrayal of affect, or rather, its lack. You might argue that they are an investigation into what it means to be human, that takes a kind of extreme as its entry point, and I will totally grant you that there is something really interesting going on there. It's just that I just don't especially enjoy reading it, these days.

Didion is, however, an incredible writer. Like I said already, the book has momentum. The pacing is especially clever, with chapters ranging in length from a few pages to a paragraph. The language is unadorned but powerful. I was completely absorbed.

I guess the take away message here is, if you're going to read one 'emotionally-vacant-character-making-a-mess-of-herself' novel this year, it might as well be this one.

I did not LIKE this book, which doesn’t mean it wasn’t well written (?), I just didn’t like it. It was depressing, I didn’t understand the plot and everyone was awful.

As a depiction of depression, it’s very good. Listless, confused, illogical.