Ask the Chatbot Games & Quizzes History & Society Science & Tech Biographies Animals & Nature Geography & Travel Arts & Culture ProCon Money Videos
Play It As It Lays
Introduction References & Edit History Related Topics
Images
Play It As It Lays
Britannica AI Icon
Adding us as a Preferred Source tells Google you trust our content, so our articles show up more often in your Google Search, Discover feed, and AI Overviews.
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

External Websites
Play It As It Lays
Play It As It Lays The book cover for Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays (1970), featuring Tuesday Weld, who starred in the 1972 film adaptation.

Play It As It Lays

novel by Didion
Written by
David Tucker
David Tucker is a contributor to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012), where an earlier version of this Britannica entry first appeared.
David Tucker
Fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
Britannica Editors
History

Play It As It Lays, second novel written by American essayist and novelist Joan Didion. First published in 1970, it is regarded as a defining example of modern American fiction.

Didion’s novel of 1960s dissolution centers on the character Maria Wyeth, a minor actress whose career and marriage are both dissolving. The story focuses on Maria’s messy world on the fringes of half-formed social-convenience networks built around the edges of the filming industry.

Framed as an explanation of how Maria came to be in a psychiatric hospital, the novel, told in spare, evocative prose, describes in a few strokes her life in Nevada as the daughter of a gambler and his unhappy wife. Maria moves to New York to become an actress, and shortly thereafter her mother dies in a single-car accident. Maria marries Carter, who directed her in two movies, and they have a daughter, Kate, who is institutionalized with unspecified developmental disabilities. With no emotional attachment to Carter or their friends, Maria spends her days driving aimlessly around southern California and occasionally indulging in unengaged affairs. She often makes unannounced visits to the facility where Kate lives. Maria becomes pregnant, and Carter threatens to keep her from Kate if she does not have an abortion, an operation which is illegal. She arranges for and undergoes the abortion, but this prompts her to deeply miss her mother. Unable to face any news in which children are harmed, Maria begins isolating herself and increasingly chooses to numb herself with alcohol and drugs. She daydreams scenarios in which she and Kate live in happy domesticity. Her life continues to unravel. One evening a friend, who shares Maria’s sense of meaninglessness, comes to her with a bottle of vodka and some pills, which he takes; Maria holds him as he dies. Her passivity in the face of her friend’s suicide leads to her confinement in the psychiatric hospital. Unlike her friend, Maria thinks it necessary to continue “playing the game.”

There is a pop-nihilism throughout. The title of the book comes from advice Maria’s father gave her about both gambling and life. Maria is an apathetic and drifting character, and her decline gains momentum throughout the novel, with her only anchor her attachment to her daughter. Play It As It Lays is admired for Didion’s clear and precise prose and its exposure of the abjection of what many supposed was Hollywood glamor.

David Tucker