Play It As It Lays

‘Play It As It Lays’ is about having everything, yet having nothing. When you have the world at the tip of your finger, what is there to look forward to? Maria is a model/ movie star, married to a very famous Hollywood director. Maria lost her daughter, her husband, her unborn baby. As she pushes herself further away from everyone she has once known, she begins to lose friends, opportunities for work, bits of who she once was. Efforts are made to rope Maria back into the swing of things, but mostly for concern of her mental well-being. How can you help someone who doesn’t want to be helped? She buzzes through life cloudy and high on uppers and downers, drugs that I had to look up the names of while reading to see their effects. (Most now classified as Schedule II and no longer made due to their high potential for abuse) She drives through the Mojave desert for the sake of going somewhere, stopping in gas stations on the side of the highway. She rots in bed, sleeping in till noon, even later- she has nothing to wake up for. She drives to Vegas- not to gamble, but to hang around, wander, bump into old friends. She doesn’t eat, (unless you’re counting the occasional cottage cheese or hard boiled egg) she drinks Coca Cola in the desert heat from glass bottles and buys too many groceries at the store to not appear lonely. She doesn’t want people to know how alone she truly is- her daughter in a hospital, her husband away on movie sets sleeping with his coworkers. BZ is Maria’s one true friend throughout the novel, although she tends to push him away too. He understands Maria’s depression and feels it himself as well- something the two continuously bond over throughout the novel. Published in 1970 by Didion, you can see exactly why it is considered a ‘cool, intellectual girl book’ from page one. It reads so modern. The protagonist is a sad girl icon. The ending is emotional, but dulled by Didion’s writing style- intentional in a way so that we feel it the way Maria must h