My New Friend, "PLAY IT AS IT LAYS," by Joan Didion

 

Me and my new friend, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, and what a brutal, relentless friend it is!

Hi. My name is Bobby Keniston, and my only friends are books. That's right. I have seen the nothing, but I keep on playing. So... there's that. 

Speaking of such things, let's talk about my new friend, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. I have read Didion's brilliant book of essays The White Album, and her memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking  and Blue Nights. I have only read one other of her novels, A Book of Common Prayer. 

Joan Didion passed away in December of 2021, and in her honor, I started keeping a notebook, something I have never really been able to do with any regularity before, and by some miracle, have actually written in it every night. 

Play It As It Lays was published in 1970, and was made into a movie in 1972 starring Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins. Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne wrote the screenplay. Interesting, sine the books is unquestionably scathing in terms of L.A., the movie business, and the 1960s. Some compare Didion to Nathanael West with this book, which I think is apt. I can also see how it must have influenced a writer like Bret Easton Ellis, a vocal Didion devotee (he even quoted the opening line of this novel during an interview with Larry King). 

So how about I introduce you?

HOW I MET MY NEW FRIEND

As I said above, I am already a Joan Didion fan, and have made it a point to try to make friends with as many of her books as I can get. This novel was at my local library, The Thompson Free, so I happily grabbed it. 

ABOUT MY NEW FRIEND

Play It As It Lays is told in a series of short, electric, and often cutting chapters. There are 84, to be exact, some not even a full page in length. I have mentioned how I like this technique, how, for me, it tends to make every moment pop, seem very alive, and this novel is no different. If anything, Play It As It Lays is even more "relentless" as Library Journal described it. 

It tells the story of Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-ah) Wyeth, who we meet in a mental hospital. There are a few short first person accounts, and then the novel dives into a third person narrative as we take the journey to learn how Maria ended up in the hospital. The journey includes her upbringing in the desert with her failed father, her becoming an actress on the East Coast, marrying film director Carter Lang and appearing in a few of his movies (including a documentary about her, unreleased), her Hollywood lifestyle, her hospitalized daughter Kate who she desperately loves, and her eventual divorce. 

What I did not know going in was that an underground, illegal abortion and its subsequent complications plays a huge role in the narrative. It hit me in a big way, especially since the SCOTUS may very well be overturning Roe v Wade, making humiliating, dangerous abortions like the one depicted in the book a very real possibility in this country again. And that makes me sick. 

I am not going to lie: this book is rough. Rough. But, goddamn, Didion writes so very well, and the prose simply crackles. 

IMPORTANT TAKEAWAYS

I am not going to spoil the book, but I will say that one of the major themes of the book deals with the question, "What does anything matter?"  And often, one can't help but think that our characters here, and the 1960s themselves, leads to a very chilling answer---

Nothing. 

Nothing at all. 

But this book matters. It's unflinching honesty matters in a big way. 

Thanks for reading my take on Play It As It Lays. Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments.