Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion

Have you ever met and girl and thought, “Yeah she could probably ruin my life, and I’d apologize for it?” Well, that’s the feeling I get when I read Joan Didion. For example, I’ve famously despised the desert for many personal reasons, but somehow reading Joan write about her fascination with the desert makes me inclined to walk aimlessly through Nevada. Will I become stranded in the desert only to die of thirst if the hallucinations don’t get to me first? Would it matter either way? These are the feelings that Didion gives me. In other words, she is my worst nightmare, and the fact that she is able to still crawl under my skin into my thoughts is equally terrifying.

I was first introduced to Joan Didion in January of 2019. I was flying to Manchester and wanted some book recommendations from a friend. I was handed The White Album and was super excited to read a book about The Beatles before I landed in their native land. Unfortunately, the English band was not mentioned once; but rather, I was introduced to an autobiographical novel of Joan Didion and her life in the 1960s. Admittedly, the book was alright; it was good, not great. However, I had never been more attracted to someone’s writing style. It was the syntax and diction that kept me reading. For the first time, I recognized the art of putting one’s ideas into words. I wish this wasn’t that case, as seven months later, I was recommended yet another work by Didion, one that may be the antithesis to the vision of my life. Joan Didion’s, Play It As It Lays, comes with a caution: there is no bottom to Hell, trust me, she would know.

Play It As It Lays is the story of an actress, Maria (pronounced Mariah), living in Hollywood. She has a daughter, an abusive husband (also an actor), and some other famous friends. Throughout the book we objectively watch Maria battle depression and addiction, she has an abortion, and worst of all, her apathetic view of the world around her. It is this mindset that continually destroys everything that she has going for her. In short, this book is pure existentialism. One of Didion’s famous quotes about writing is that,

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“In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions–with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather that stating–but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

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Writing as an aggressive act. Yes, Play It As It Lays is indeed a hostile attempt to impose her ideas on her readers, and in that, she does a fantastic job. Whenever I read, I always tend to dive into the authors’ ideas, but I absolutely drowned in Didion’s thoughts. Maria’s lack of identity and inability to actually be a fundamental human being, somehow touched something deep inside of me. I guess it’s the fear that at any point, I may be convinced that nothing matters– that this is all a game we have no choice but to play. After turning over the last page of the book I was left silent with chills. The only consolation I had when reading this is that I still felt something, even if it was just chills.

Favorite Quotes

- To hear the sound of her own footsteps Maria stood up and walked.

- 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.