When I finished reading this book the other day, I suddenly realized that I hadn't really appreciated it correctly. That I needed to reread it right away because I hadn't read it the right way and because there is a lot that you don't have enough information to make sense of the first time around.I don't understand how people can call this book cold and sterile. I just thought it was so rich and textured and heartbreaking. I feel like the little chapters are like puzzle pieces and each piece is

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 pers...

Don't quite know how she did it, but it's rare I come across a novel that I found so alienating and distant, yet so warm at the same time. Didion's Play it as it lays which takes place across Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert, and Las Vegas is full of excess truths that dart across it's pages more like a prophecy. Didion opens proceedings in not the greatest of places one would want to be - a mental institution, with a not unfamiliar piece of wisdom that sometimes the people on the inside are somet...

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 Unive...

Well, now I know where Brett Easton Ellis got the inspiration for "Less Than Zero". Except Joan Didion is a much, much better writer than him.

I did not enjoy a single moment of reading this book but I like it. Honestly don’t read if you’re feeling depressed, as it is depression incarnate. Chapter 42 was so incisively brutal that I had to take a breather for a while. Still 5 stars lol

The name of the gameNOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.Even if I had initially the intention to embark on a collection of her essays or The Year of Magical Thinking first, Play It As it Lays happened to be my first Joan Didion. Because of the enthusiast recommendations that reached me over the years, I had high hopes on reading Didio...

Update 12/23/21: RIP Joan DidionEverything 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. Th...

So that she would not have to stop for food she kept a hard-boiled egg on the passenger seat of the Corvette. She could shell and eat a hard-boiled egg at seventy miles an hour (crack it on the steering wheel, never mind salt, salt bloats, no matter what happened she remembered her body). Which author could possibly begin a novel with the words:What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.Well surprisingly enough Joan Didion. And these words set in motion the inevitable direction that t

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, despera...

Everything, eventually, gets old.People get gray hairs. Cookies get stale. Books get that amazing smell that is apparently just mold or mildew or something awful but we won't think about it because, to paraphrase Wesley from the Princess Bride, there is a shortage of perfect things in this world and it would be a shame to ruin this one. Comedians start being f*cked up and stop being funny and call it persecution.Age comes for us all.But one thing that will never get old is women writing works of...

“There was silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.” Joan DidionWhenever Maria called, it was as if the ringing of the phone heralded the end of any conviviality I might have been harboring. I always had the impression when I talked with her that the Fun to Be Around Maria was dying in another room, and all I was left with was the beautiful corpse. She wa...

All right, let's discuss...It has been a month since I read this little ditty, and in that one month's time, it has managed to lose a star. Because honestly, I can't give a book 5 stars just because I couldn't put it down, just because it was a "quick read." If that was the standard, every Jodi Picoult book I've ever read would be given 5 stars. When it comes down to it, while I did thoroughly enjoy this book, it isn't one that's going to stay with me through the ages. It isn't one I'm going to

Recently my five y/o daughter caught the first minute of the "Thriller" video. I say the first minute because upon seeing Michael look up at the camera with yellow eyes and fangs she threw her hands up, screamed at the top of her lungs, ran from the room, into her room, ran back into the room (still screaming), out of the room, back in and buried her head into the safety of my comforting lap (still screaming). Now I realize this is most people's reaction to seeing Micheal's post '90s decomposing...

The nihilism that clings to the protagonist Maria Wyeth throughout this book is like an oppressive coating over her whole being. Maria’s disaffection with her life and the moral ambiguity of the world she inhabits is almost too depressing to read about. Maria is incapable of connecting with anyone. You could say she is in a perpetual lock-down. To illustrate that, let me quote the last paragraph of the book: “One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or He...