I’m so happy to have reread Joan Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays a second time – like maybe forty years after the first time.  When I read it in college, I wasn’t at the maturity level to truly appreciate the Great JD, but now I look at her with new eyes.  This novel has to be one of the best I have ever read. As soon as I finished it, I realized its brilliance, and I went right back to reading it again from page one. It starts with this line: “What Makes Iago Evil?”  Joan doesn’t answer this question, but she gives us an up-and-close look at a lot of Iago-like characters, quite possibly from her own life,  that will make us, especially living in this day and age,  think long and hard about this question.

In college, I read her collections of essays,  The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.  I liked those.  Who didn’t?  These anthologies were game-changers.  Joan was one of the pioneers of new journalism.  She was the type of writer that put herself in  the middle of her stories. She had her hand on the pulse, so to speak, of what she was writing about. I mean,  Joan lived the life. In the early sixties she moved to Hollywood with her husband John Gregory Dunne.  She went to parties, she hosted parties, and she drove a very fast car.  That’s what half this book, Play It As It Lays, is all about –   Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘N’ Roll.   The other half of the book is about a young actress losing her mind.

I remember Joan from the iconic sixties picture of her smoking a cigarette in front of her Corvette.  This photo was taken by Julian Wasser for Time Magazine, some time after Slouching Towards Bethlehem and some time before Play It As It Lays.  Joan was on her way to becoming the literary icon we know her as today.   First of all, Joan was a beautiful woman. From a picture  like this, you would expect someone to to be writing a novel about her, not her writing a literary masterpiece.  Her hair is parted down the middle, and she’s draped in a long, lightweight transparent dress.  Her expression is mysterious – cool and detached.  This is an important image, because the character she writes about in Play It Like It Lays, Maria Wyeth, very much resembles the author.  Maria is the young actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  I’m not familiar enough with Joan’s personal background to think this is an autobiographical novel, but many of the events and emotions hit close to home.  Maria is a young woman who started her career in New York and moved to L.A. to seek better opportunity.  So did Joan.  Maria is married to a controlling, abusive husband.  Same thing, apparently,  for Joan.  This is probably why I feel a twinge in my stomach at the turn of each page.  Are these scenes Joan paints so frightening and awful because she has experienced them, or is she a genius for creating them.  From early on, we know nothing good is going to come to Maria.

Here is one scene that I want to share.  It happens early on in the novel.  Maria, who pronounces her name  Mar-eye-ah,  is a young Hollywood actress that has been in two movies so far.  Her first is an experimental film about her life as a New York City model.  Her film director husband, Carter, had followed her around for weeks with a hand-held camera. Even though this cinema verité-type documentary may have received some positive reviews,  Maria hates it, not for the quality of the film, but because she doesn’t recgonize the young woman on screen.  Carter’s second attempt at filming Maria was a commercial success, a psychedelic motorcycle picture where the protagonist, Maria, gets gang-raped.  This is the asshole she is married to, a director puts her in these types of scenes, and apparently takes great pleasure doing so.    In the middle of the novel  Maria will finally divorce Carter, but that won’t enable her to escape from the bottom of his thumb.  This novel is about abusive men.  They are everywhere, but no one more cruel than Carter.

Early on in Play It, Maria is driving her Corvette along the Hollywood Freeway to the Harbor Freeway. Joan gives us just enough detail to feel the excitement of driving the Corvette with the top down and the radio on, but not much else of an explanation of what Maria is thinking or feeling.  Like where she is going, we just don’t know; she spends a lot of time behind the wheel driving aimilessly to fill in the emptiness of her days.   This may be the brilliance of Joan’s writing style.  Maybe it’s called the Iceberg Theory of writing.  She is adept at showing us the surface of a person or an event, and she leaves the rest of us to ascertain what is happening underneath.  I’m good with that.  I’ve had friends who  have spent a lot of time driving, but not really gotten anywhere.   They think no one will miss them because they have no friends.  That’s one problem; the other is their drug and alcohol addiction.  They are in a constant state of running away from something.  In this Corvette scene, however, Maria is shown snacking on a hardboiled egg she has just cracked on the steering wheel, simultaneously racing across traffic to make her off-ramp.  Why do I like this scene so much?  Maria seems to feel a rare control of her life she doesn’t find anywhere else:  “Once she finally did it without once braking  or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhiarated, and that night she slept dreamlessly.”   Many readers may wonder what keeps Maria up at nights.  Joan wrote this novel during the time of the Manson murders.  The characters in this book may not know it, but Joan did, there is something evil coming their way.

I’m inspired for Joan’s writing style.  Apparently she learned from one of the great masters, Ernest Hemingway.  In an interview with the Paris Review, she credits Hemingway for making her the writer she became. When she was still in high school, she typed the entire novel The Sun Also Rises in her bedroom.  Not only did she learn how to type, but she developed a sense for how sentences worked.    This is the Iceberg Theory I previously mentioned. Feelings are addressed but not fully explained.  In typing out Hemingway, she developed a rhythm and flow in her writing.  Nothing wasted.  But Didion’s art of omission has even deeper roots.  She said this in her White Album:  “It’s just a personality trait,” she says. “I don’t like things that are stated openly. I’m interested in what’s left out and what’s not quite said. I don’t tend to think that people say what they mean. What they mean is something other than what they’re saying. I don’t mean the opposite, just other.”

I’m not writing a book report here, and I don’t plan to assign a Joan Didion novel in any of my courses, but that won’t stop me from sharing a Joan Didion quote to inspire my students: “I’m just telling you to live it…. To look at it.  To get the picture.  To life recklessly.  To take chances.  To make your own work and take pride in it.”

Suddenly, my students are relying on AI to submit their finished essays. As if they don’t care for what they write or who reads it.  I’m not all too sure what they are doing or how they learned to do it, but a frightening percentage type my assignment instructions into ChatGPT to write their personal essay.   Joan, who wrote long before the internet was invented, must be rolling in her grave.   In her day,  she not only wanted to write the truth, but share a sense of what it was like to live it.  It wasn’t easy.  She wrote on the edge.  Her thoughts, feelings and anxiety respective to her role as a writer help her readers construct meaning of a selected topic.

As far as I’m concerned, no one writes like Joan Didion.  A lot of the young women in my classes will connect with what she says.  So will the young men.  It’s because she has her fingers on their pulse.  Her art rises up from the life she lives. The secret of her writing,  I believe, is Joan’s relentless devotion to be her own person. I’m not so sure I will ever read Play It with my students, but I plan to squeeze in a number of Joan’s iconic essays into my lesson plans. My hope is that some of Joan rubs off on my students.