Play It As It Lays

Play It as It Lays is a novel by Joan Didion published in 1970. It was named one of TIME’s 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923-2005, cementing its status as one of the greatest works of American literature. In 1972, the novel was adapted for film, and Didion and her husband co-wrote the screenplay.

Joan Didion is known for her fiction and nonfiction as well as for screenplays and a memoir entitled The Year of Magical Thinking. She has received numerous awards, including the St. Louis Literary Award, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Evelyn F. Burkey Award, and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. Didion received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Harvard University in 2009 and another from Yale University in 2011. In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts.

Plot Summary

Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-ah) Wyeth Lang is a 31-year-old actress who lives in Beverly Hills. She has been institutionalized in the University of California, Los Angeles’s Neuropsychiatric ward ever since her friend BZ committed suicide about a month before. The doctors have asked Maria to give an account of the events that led to her emotional breakdown. She begins with her childhood in Silver Wells, Nevada, a small town her father owned that was built on a missile testing range. She leaves home at 18 to become an actress in New York, not because she is ambitious, but because her parents think it’s a good idea.

While in New York, she meets the novel’s antagonist, Carter Lang, an auteur director who casts her in his two first films. One of the films is a success, making both her and Carter famous. Maria’s mother dies in a car accident; Maria marries Carter and moves to Beverly Hills. The pressures of being a Hollywood socialite, contrary to her introverted nature, only compound her distress. Maria and Carter have a daughter, Kate, but she has a brain disorder, and Carter confines her to a medical facility. Maria grieves deeply, but those around Maria, including Carter, dismiss her attempts to express her feelings.

Carter’s fame as a director grows while Maria’s career as an actress stagnates; for most of the novel, Carter is away filming in the desert or touring Europe. Left alone in their immaculate Beverly Hills home, Maria spends her days driving on the Los Angeles freeways. She abuses drugs and alcohol and goes to meaningless parties to help numb her pain. She has an affair with a married screenwriter and finds out she is pregnant. When she tells Carter, he forces her to get an abortion.

The abortion is physically, psychologically, and emotionally traumatic. The male doctors dismiss her pain, and they prescribe her the same kind of opioid medication that she abuses illegally. After enduring Carter’s abuse, Maria decides to divorce him. To cope with her trauma and loneliness, Maria engages in increasingly risky behavior. She steals the car of an actor who once pressured her to have sex, and she gets pulled over in Las Vegas for drug possession.

Maria’s closest friends are BZ and Helene, a couple she met through Carter. BZ and Helene are in a contract marriage arranged by BZ’s mother to hide his sexual orientation. Seeing that she is on a downward spiral, they convince her to come to the desert where Carter is filming. Maria discovers BZ’s plan to overdose on sleeping pills. She tries to dissuade him but fails.

Maria claims to be happy in the psychiatric ward. She no longer has to deal with meaningless socializing and does not have to see Helene and Carter, who have become a couple and stop by frequently. The only person she misses is her daughter Kate. Maria fantasizes about getting Kate out of her medical facility and living a quiet life with her, just as she once lived with her parents.