Play It As It Lays
Our book for today is “Play it As it Lays” by Joan Didion. Raised in Sacramento, California, Joan took her BA in English at Berkeley. During her senior year, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue, and began working as a research assistant in their office in New York upon her graduation. While there, she wrote her first book about California “Run, River”, met and married her husband and lifelong companion John Gregory Dunne, also a writer. In 1964, they moved together to Los Angeles and worked as essay writers for newsstand magazines, sometimes collaborating together.
As she published her first non-fiction book “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, a collection of essays of her experiences in California, Joan began to gain prominence as a writer and began to mingle with the last actors and musicians of Hollywood’s Golden Age; which came to an abrupt halt after Tate-La Bianca murders, carried out by Charles Manson’s followers. Joan, who was a friend of the key witness of the killings, Linda Kasabian, was able to see first hand the glamourized corruption and volatile nature of Hollywood, both before and after the Golden Age was brought to its abrupt end. During this time, Joan struggled to understand the senseless, dark atmosphere of Los Angeles, and began to “doubt the premises of all the stories [she] had been told”, as she writes in the book she published of those times, “White Album”.
“Play It As It Lays” was published in 1970, a year after the Tate-La Bianca murders. The main character, Maria, is a reflection of Joan, who was coming to terms with the meaningless of experience, something which she says “everyone in Los Angeles has to come to terms with”. Maria, a former actress and model, is also experiencing the nothingness of life, and spends her days driving around the freeways of California and drinking Coca Cola on the lounge chair she sleeps in by her pool. A short and poignant novel, “Play It as It Lays” details Maria’s descent into madness, as she mourns her four-year old daughter Kate, who is hospitalized for an unknown brain disease.
Joan’s humorous and nihilistic descriptions of Hollywood starlet life, as well as gorgeous detailing of freeway driving and California roads, bring an elegance and ease to the dark matter it deals with: the meaning of nothing, and the consequences when you find it.
