This book sucked. I just didnt like it at all. I am still trying to understand why its a beloved book and why it has so many high ratings. The only thing I can come up with is that its a book written for its time. I was born way after Roe v Wade and a lil bit more than a decade after this book was written. I feel this must have been very provoking in 70s to feature a women facing abortion when it was illegal. Maybe if it happen to a better character and if the writting made more sense. Not just a story told in small doses with no character development, I would have been interested in it. Sadly, this book was a waste of time.

“There were two trees in the town, two cottonwoods in the dry river bed, but one of them was dead.”

OUCH. This is ice cold Didion. Desolate Didion. Despondent Didion. This book is some layer of hell that you spend time in and hope to god you can find your way out.

That being said it is something else. She is the master of her craft. The short sentences. The alchemical sense of nature in its relative setting. The disconnected observation that even in this fictional writing would lead you to believe she is careless with humans emotion. Ah but she is not. She takes all of the dramas and elaborate breakdowns and turns them into compact horrors. More palpable in their smallness.

It’s a nasty read and I’m glad it’s over but it’s brilliant


What a devastating week: Shine on beautiful Joan and Eve Babitz. The glitter has faded in Hollywood.
My heart is heavy.

Depressing and a little abrupt--I appreciated how fast it went but also I kept forgetting what was going on.

Okay for starters, I LOVE Joan Didion. I read her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking and absolutely loved it. She had such an elegant writing style, while still being completely raw to grief and what she went through. But this isn’t a review for that book, and honestly I was really disappointed reading this book after her memoir. The beginning was very slow and confusing, I’m still not sure that I completely understand how all the characters are related to one another. There really wasn’t much happening and a lot of it was very vague and just frankly sort of awkward. I did finish the book despite being very bored, mostly because I can’t, in good conscience, write a review without finishing the whole book. I’m glad I did, because I did eventually get hooked a little into the story and started to feel more involved in the characters lives, but nonetheless it definitely was not my cup of tea. One redeeming quality was that every once in a while, out of the blue, a character would say something that just made me burst out laughing because this book was written in 1970 so the lingo is definitely not up-to-date and I got a kick out of the way that some things were phrased, but that’s just a me-thing. Anyway, I love Joan Didion, but definitely did not love this book.

‘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 reader. the short, cyclically chronological chapters gave the book an air of journal entries, and the dialogue showed the relationships between people with such clarity that it was impossible not to admire it, even though it didn’t truly allow for a moment of certainty or understanding. i’m still confused about many of the things that happened in the novel, but i’ve come to terms with that. i love it in its curious complexity.

i found each and every single character in the book utterly fascinating in their intricacies. i somehow feel maria was a sort of mold or original muse for the ever-growing creation of sad, indifferent, and uncaring female main characters. despite the date of her creation, the date of her existence, she feels so rarely modern, so real and currently relatable. i loved everything she had to say, everything she thought and felt in regards to others and life itself, because she managed to express it in ways i wish i could.

conclusively, this was a very satisfying read. its length, didion’s writing, the cyclical and almost uneventful plot, the characterisation, the descriptions—they were all masterfully developed. i feel this is what i’ve continually been looking for in a book, and i’m glad to’ve finally found it.

~ 4.5

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.

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. I like 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 say that. I read hardly any contemporary fiction, so am no judge of benchmarks and besides, There is No Progress in the Arts. Interesting to compare it with Connell’s Bridge novels – his vignettes, which seemed “radically spare and minimal” to me a week ago, nonetheless offer stories, capsule meaning, however vanishingly subtle; Didion’s are a shrug and a sigh held together with a mumbled cliché – her style is a perfect vehicle for her protagonist’s sense that nothing means anything. This novel was firmly in three star territory – admire but don’t love – until the action shifted to Vegas, and from there to the desert waste with its ghost towns and missile ranges and cinder-block motels; its shifting, notional settlements of trailers and campers.

This novel starts out with its protagonist, Maria Wyeth, asking an interesting question. She says, "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask." A person who knows who they are never asks such a question. But I don't fully believe that our protagonist is such a person. In fact she, along with the rest of the book's cast of characters, doesn't even seem fully dimensional to me.
Stylistically the text is interesting. The chapters are very short, and we are told the story in a nonlinear fashion, with a lot of gaps. This makes the reader feel disconcerted and disjointed, and Ms. Didion was successful in her attempt to make the book's style reflect its protagonist's state of mind. Ms. Didion's writing also reminds me a lot of Hemmingway. "Play It As It Lays" is not a text for the casual reader, although it is a quick read. A big stumbling block for me is that I just could not shake the nagging feeling that this text is terribly dated. Its content might have been shocking and useful as tools to express the emptiness of one's life in 1970, but the things it depicts (abortion, S&M, drug use, etc.) is now seen daily on HBO. Didion uses the aforementioned items in a powerful and non-gratuitous manner in the text, but it just does not shock the senses as much now as it must have 40 plus years ago.
"Play It As It Lays" does have many things going for it however. The way in which the abortion and its aftermath are portrayed in the text is difficult to read, and the raw intensity of the emotion shown is tautly and clearly rendered. The protagonist's marriage is also horrifically, and wonderfully, written. They say horrid things to each other. They are downright cruel. It is an unexplainable marriage, and it reeks of reality.
I guess the reason why I did not enjoy this text is that I feel it is just a very hopeless book. The novel's closing line sounds hopeful, but it does not feel hopeful at all. Be warned, this is not a pleasant story to consume.

"Of course she could not call a plumber, because she had known all along what would be found in the pipes, what hacked pieces of human flesh."

Some books have the strength to darken the mood so much that I could not pick up another book about women suffering and somehow I have a lot of books about this specific topic which is kind of concerning. Anyway, Joan Didion managed to make me so depressed after having finished "Play It As It Lays" that I had to pick up something more lighthearted.

The plot follows a couple of months of Maria Wyeth's life as a somewhat retired actress who just got divorced from her husband. She is numbing herself with alcohol, drugs, and love affairs to drown her emptiness that partially comes from her illegal abortion (the whole plotline about the abortion is wonderfully written). Throughout the book, the nihilistic tone becomes more apparent and the only question is: why does she play along? Why is she still around people who continuously hurt her?

I saw Bret Easton Ellis's fascination with Joan Didion as many scenes from her book reminded me of the ones from "The Shards" and I heard that "Less Than Zero" should be also reminiscent of Didion's setting and tone. Having only read "The Shards" I must say that I prefer Bret Easton Ellis' approach to "rich-people-having-way-too-much-freedom". His execution was rich in details which shows in the everlasting description of designer clothes. The characters were distinguishable and not lacking any depth. Overall, his prose appealed more to me.

Joan Didion is a good writer, I am not denying that. I was addicted to this book. The short chapters made me want more and I was lured by her captivating, raw but still distant writing style. But after 100 pages I just did not care anymore about what was happening to Maria. Everything seemed insignificant at some point. Maria did not care anymore and so did I. I am sure that this nihilistic, resigned tone is what Joan Didion wanted in this book but it did not work for me. I missed the ambiguity in the characters, especially in Maria. I want characters who are struggling, questioning, feeling, reflecting, and being somehow alive. Maria felt dead for me. The other characters were a little bit more lively in their communication but still onedimensional (especially BZ) and I kept forgetting who they were and how they are related to the main character. Everyone lacked color.

I have complicated feelings towards this book. I liked the ideas, I liked the writing style, I liked the ending, but I kept asking myself: what is behind this depressing atmosphere in this book? Does Didion tell me more than that her main character is going through a very sad and numb episode of her life? What about a philosophical, psychological, societal, or even economic sphere that could be integrated to achieve more depth? The novel operates solely on an observatory level which is not enough for me to call this a great book.

hot girls read Joan Didion like she’s the messiah but perhaps I’m just not hot girl because this was bland and boring to slug through

aesthetic component of it is great though. really nice spine and cover

Update 12/23/21: RIP Joan Didion

Everything 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. 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.

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 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:

n  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.n

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.