Ms Didion I love you

One of those books you want to immediately go to the beginning and read again....if it weren't so bleak.

Her prose was so fluid. I was immediately immersed.

The rattlesnake as a recurring motif- and like an albatross.

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.

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.

Full of memorable lines and utterly engrossing, Play it as It Lays is a new favorite. I read it pretty quickly but it took a lot out of me to do so. Must find more Didion...

sometimes i am a hater.

Obvs., this reread was undertaken as an homage, due to the author's recent passing - I first read it about 40 years back and I can see why it's the most popular of her fiction. In preparation, I also rewatched the 1972 film adaptation, which is excellent as well, and follows the book fairly closely, since Didion and her hubby co-wrote the screenplay. I heartily recommend both - Tuesday Weld (Venice Film Festival Best Actress Award for this) and Tony Perkins were perfect casting and give incredible performances.

I’m not really sure what to rate this yet, but wow. Joan Didion captures loneliness, isolation, control, and emotional separation so well through Maria. Play It As It Lays is a heavy book to read, but Didion’s writing is sharp and fast-paced. I had a great experience reading this.

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, 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 getting an abortion - no one's really sure who the father might have been - and it fucks her up even further, 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 chooses to keep her friend BZ company, instead of stopping him, as he commits suicide. She ends up, maybe mercifully, in an asylum for it. 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.

I hate to give Didion such a low rating because I do love her sparse yet sharply observant prose. I just found it very hard to become absorbed in or connected to a book that is essentially about meaninglessness. Perhaps I should stick to her essays and memoirs.

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.

My second reading of Play It As It Lays began in a small plane flying right over Tonopah, Nevada, on a trip back from Utah. At 12,000ft the air was cold and thin, the cabin not pressurized, and Joan Didion held me firmly in her grip. I wondered if this grip would hold and I'm happy to say that it did—even after returning to the ground.

Mar-eye-ah Wyeth remains a hot mess express who chooses her doctors based on their proximity to Saks, moving through her own life as if through a dream, but I felt for her the second time around. Rich and priviledged and her own worst enemy, but also suffering at the hands of the men around her. Musical Beds is the name of the game. The abortion remains a powerful and important part of the story, and I could read a whole book on Helene and BZ's relationship. Disturbing the Peace, Myra Breckinridge, and The Public Image/The Driver's Seat all variously came to mind. Depressing, sure, but not without hope.

If this were a Friends episode it would be titled "The One with All the Ratings." The one that gets read because it's on that list. The one whose reviews contain words like zeitgeist. The one whose protagonist is the poster child for what has come to be known as a sad-girl book.

A few life lessons: Life is empty and devoid of meaning. Hollywood is nothing but a shimmering mirage. Money can't buy happiness, and marriage is a challenge even under the best of circumstances. Hit the road, escape to the desert, but you'll have to take yourself with.

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 all sorts of men - straight and bisexual - and makes love with them. Like how Capote pictured showbusiness in that era, the characters in this book seem to be living in another planet or maybe the plain-looking me is not born to be aware of how that world operates. Aside from sleeping around, they love to use drugs, drink booze, live "empty" lives, believe in nothing including themselves and see nothing in or dream nothing good about their future. So, Maria gets pregnant and even when she is already a mother, she still lives an empty life. She seems to abhor it and at several points, you can see that she struggles to set her life straight but she seems to have been engulfed by the world that she lives in.

Aside from the beautiful lyrical prose of Didion, I think that inner struggle in Maria is what makes the story worth reading if not once but twice. The ennui and the meaningless of the showbiz life in America in the 60's have been more adequately captured by Capote in his memoirs and probably shown by the movie Boogie Nights. However, the state of the depression and the inner struggle of the female protagonist is simply captivating. Janice Galloway did it in The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (4 stars) was able to do in 236 pages of a standard-sized trade paperback but Joan Didion only did in 168 in a small thin paperback.

If you are fascinated with Hollywood in the 1960's and you want to know how women think at the edge of a bigtime depression, go for this book. Opps, if you want to know how good a writer Didion is, that should be the bigger reason to pick this book up and read when you are not sad and if you want to be a bit sad.