Book Review: Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion (1970)

The cover of Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion, 1970.

She read the book quickly. It did not seem to matter much how the sentences were arranged, or whatever exactly the sentences said, because they all seemed very long and emotionless and the kind of sentences you could read for a very long time without really absorbing much of anything. The main character was an actress, but she didn’t seem to do much acting, and her agent was trying to get her to take more acting jobs so she wouldn’t be so depressed, and finally she did take this one acting job on a TV show, and that was the only time during the whole novel that she actually did some acting, but it was clear she didn’t like doing the TV show. The character was really depressed and isolated and bored, and that seemed to be the whole vibe the book was giving, depression and boredom. Ennui, that was it. Everything sounds better in French. Maybe instead of saying we’re depressed we should just start saying we have ennui, which made her think of Alain Delon lying around the swimming pool in La Piscine, and she thought of how gorgeous Romy Schneider was in La Piscine, and how if Alain Delon and Romy Schneider had a baby together it would have been so beautiful but they didn’t have a baby together and after Romy Schneider died so young Alain Delon never watched La Piscine again because it made him too sad, and that sounded very romantic and very French to her, to deprive yourself of a beautiful movie because it made you too sad and she thought of Alain Delon’s beautiful blue eyes filling with tears and that made her very sad.  

The one thing the actress liked doing was driving her car on the freeways, and that did seem like it would be pretty cool. She imagined if she had an old Corvette like this actress had and like Joan Didion had, you know, the kind with the long sexy hood and a T-top roof, but those old cars probably got really terrible gas mileage, and they probably weren’t good for the environment with their powerful, gas-guzzling, sexy V-8 engines that put out 300 horsepower. But they must have been fun to drive. She had never owned a car with 300 horsepower.  

She understood some of the reasons why the actress in this book was so depressed, because literally everything in her life was really terrible and awful. The actress was getting a divorce, and her husband seemed self-absorbed and egotistical, and there were probably a lot of men like that in Hollywood in those days, and the actress had this gay friend that she hung out with a lot, but he wasn’t like a fun gay best friend, he seemed like a drag as well, and he had a lot of money and his mother paid him money to be married to a woman, and that didn’t seem like too bad of a deal, really, because he was still doing whatever he wanted to and his wife didn’t really seem to care very much and he bought her expensive jewelry and she seemed pretty okay with this weird kind of bargain they had made.  

The one time this actress actually seemed to enjoy something, besides driving her car on the freeway, was when she went to the Hoover Dam. The actress wanted to lie down on the main water pipe in Hoover Dam, and as she read the book she wondered if there was something sexual about the Hoover Dam for the actress. Also, as she read this part about the Hoover Dam, she thought about how Joan Didion wrote about the Hoover Dam in her book The White Album. Joan Didion wrote: “Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize...” (The White Album, p.198) And that sounded kind of weird and nutty to her. The Hoover Dam was just a big, giant slab of concrete, it sounded much more fun to have a yellow Corvette in your dreams.  

And this actress had an abortion, and that part of the novel was really, truly, awful and she thought of Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” and she remembered reading that in high school and how the questions in the short story book told you that it was actually about an abortion, and she couldn’t quite remember if she had realized when she was reading it that it was about an abortion and she remembered reading “Hills Like White Elephants” again in an American Literature class in college, and she remembered asking the other students if they knew that it was about an abortion and it was her little dig at Hemingway because sometimes he was spare and close to the bone and beautiful and other times he was just abstruse and she wondered if it was hard for Hemingway to say what he actually meant and she thought how she liked F. Scott Fitzgerald better because he could write those beautiful gorgeous sentences that would just stop you in your tracks because they were so beautifully crafted and perfect.  

She didn’t know how many stars she should give this book. She could really justify any number from 1 to 5. One star because all of the people in it were really pretty awful and there wasn’t really anybody to sympathize with, although she did kind of sympathize with the actress because everything was so awful for her, but it was more like a kind of pity for the actress and you never really got to know any of the characters well enough to feel much emotion for them, but maybe that was the whole point of the book but then why go to all the trouble to write a whole book about these people if you weren’t really supposed to feel any emotion for them? Five stars because the book did what it was probably supposed to do, which was make you feel pretty awful and rotten and be glad you weren’t as depressed as this actress was, so it was effective in doing that, and other people had thought this book was good too, and that was part of the reason she had read the book was because other people said how good it was. She had read the book really quickly, over just two days, so that was good, but she hadn’t really enjoyed reading the book, although she figured that was part of the point, that the book wasn’t meant to be enjoyed. She finally settled on three stars. 

Book Review: The World According to Joan Didion, by Evelyn McDonnell (2023)

The World According to Joan Didion, by Evelyn McDonnell, featuring the famous photo of Didion in her Corvette Stingray. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Author Evelyn McDonnell

The World According to Joan Didion, by Evelyn McDonnell, is a study of the much-acclaimed journalist and novelist. The World According to Joan Didion is a difficult book to categorize: it’s not a biography, it’s not a work of literary criticism, and it’s not a memoir of McDonnell’s relationship with Didion’s writing. This loose categorization ultimately hurts the book and prevents it from being an essential work. It’s almost as if the publisher asked Evelyn McDonnell, “Hey, can you write 240 pages about Joan Didion? Great, let’s publish it.” A tighter focus would have helped produce a better book.  

The World According to Joan Didion is organized not chronologically but thematically, which adds to the disjointed sense of the book’s purpose. The chapter titles are all one word long, relating to themes in Didion’s life and work: “Gold,” “Snake,” “Man,” “Girl,” “Hotel,” and so on. There really should have been a chapter about the Santa Ana winds, a continuing obsession of Didion’s. The titles don’t really give you much of a sense of what the chapters are about. Why the generic “Man” and “Girl” for the chapters about John Gregory Dunne and Quintana Roo Dunne, rather than “Husband” and “Daughter”? And while we’re at it, can we please talk about the name Quintana Roo? Didion and John Gregory Dunne named their adopted daughter after a province in Mexico, which is, at best, unbearably precious, and at worst, culturally appropriative.  

While I have no doubt that McDonnell has a deep knowledge of Didion’s work, the book simply does not dig deep enough into Didion’s work to fully demonstrate her excellence as a writer. McDonnell writes about Didion’s preoccupation with style, but the examples she cites from Didion’s own writings are wafer-thin. The examples are: “dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper,” “cutoff jeans and a denim Levi jacket with metal studs,” and “black silk dress,” which are all pretty basic descriptions. Surely there must be more detailed descriptions of style in Didion’s writings?  

I like Joan Didion’s writing, but I find the whole cultish adoration of Didion as a status symbol of cool a bit annoying. This type of adoration was visible in the 2022 auction of Didion’s estate. Thirteen blank notebooks of Didion’s sold for $11,000. A pair of Celine sunglasses went for $27,000. As McDonnell writes, “the one-day display of materialistic idolatry was hard to watch, even for a Didion fan.” (p.106) Ultimately, this type of fanatical adoration devalues Didion as a writer, and makes her into a status symbol, an avatar of cool and chic sensibility, a commodity—people should be valuing the words she wrote, rather than her sunglasses and her Corvette Stingray.  

Some sloppy editing mistakes occur in The World According to Joan Didion: on the same page, Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Didion is referred to by its correct title, The Last Love Song, and also, inexplicably, as The Last Love Child. (p.81) Later on, it’s noted that Tom Brokaw had a conversation with Didion and Dunne about El Salvador. One the next page of the book, it’s suddenly Dan Rather who talked to Didion and Dunne. So, which 1980’s news anchor was it, really? (p.178-9)  

McDonnell is obviously a great admirer of Didion’s writing, but she also grapples with the complexities and contradictions in Didion’s work and life. She writes: “And yet, despite her influence as a trailblazer, when it comes to being an icon for women, Joan Didion can be deeply problematic.” Didion wrote a vicious takedown of feminism in her 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement.” As McDonnell writes, “the essay was overall a mean-spirited attack on second-wave feminism that revealed more about Didion’s lack of consciousness than the real growing pains of an important and necessary movement for change.” (p.212)  

As I was reading The World According to Joan Didion, I wondered what Didion’s relationship with Tom Wolfe was like. I assume there was mutual respect for each other’s work, as Wolfe included Didion in his collection The New Journalism. But were they actually friends? I don’t know, but I'd be intrigued to learn the answer. There are interesting similarities between the two authors: they both came from backgrounds in journalism before they published books, they excelled at both fiction and journalism, they were both famous for their chic personal style, and they both wrote books about Miami—Didion’s 1987 non-fiction Miami, and Wolfe’s 2012 novel Back to Blood. Stylistically, they were opposites: whereas Wolfe was a maximalist, famous for his liberal use of exclamation points, repeated colons, and onomatopoeia, Didion was a Hemingway-esque minimalist, expressing herself in taut sentences. And while Didion usually inserted herself to some degree or another in her journalism, Wolfe assiduously kept himself out of his journalism.  

I’m not quite sure who I’d recommend The World According to Joan Didion to. If you haven’t read any of Didion’s work, it might be too much, but if you’re a diehard Didion fan, it might be too little. That’s the fundamental problem with the book, it’s not clear what it is supposed to be, and that holds it back from really being an essential work.  

Book Review: Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion (2021)

 

The front cover of Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion, 2021. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Back cover of Let Me Tell You What I Mean, by Joan Didion, 2021. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a collection of Joan Didion essays that have never appeared in book form before. It’s not recent work: 6 of the 12 essays date from 1968, and the most recent essay is from 2000. As much as I like Joan Didion’s writing, I have to say, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason for Let Me Tell You What I Mean to exist as a standalone book. It’s a collection of leftovers, essays that easily could have been included in previous Didion collections like We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, or the Library of America collections of Didion’s work. But publishing Let Me Tell What I Mean as a standalone book certainly gives these essays higher visibility than they would enjoy as part of a larger collection.

The design of Let Me Tell You What I Mean gives the game away, that this is a slim volume stretched as far as possible to make it an actual book. First, there’s the size of the book itself: just about 5x7 inches, when a more typical size for a hardcover would be 6x8.5 inches. Because of the book’s small size, there are fewer words per page than usual. The length of the book is expanded by including a whopper of an Introduction by Hilton Als—35 pages long! You might want to read the introduction after reading the essays, since Als excerpts most of the great lines.

There are strong moments in the 6 essays from 1968, which were published in The Saturday Evening Post as a column titled “Points West” that Didion shared with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. In the first essay, “Alicia and the Underground Press,” Didion highlights an issue that is very much with us today: “the inability of all of us to speak to one another in any direct way.” (p.3)

“Pretty Nancy” is a withering takedown of Nancy Reagan, then First Lady of California. It’s a great example of the New Journalism technique of close observation. Didion doesn’t intrude into the story, but she makes it clear that she thinks Nancy is an empty vessel.

“Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles,” is a look at the annual reunion of the 101^st Airborne, and presents the reader with a glimpse of men who fought in World War II, and whose sons were then fighting in Vietnam. It’s a poignant examination of loss, and probably my favorite of the 1968 essays.

For me, the highlights of the book are the 3 essays that deal with writing: “Why I Write,” “Telling Stories,” and “Last Words.” Didion writes very well about the mysteries of writing fiction. I’d be fascinated to read her thoughts about writing non-fiction, but she doesn’t discuss that here.

“Last Words” is a 1998 essay about Ernest Hemingway, and it’s clear that Didion is a studied devotee of his “less is more” style. “The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source. If we bought into those sentences, we would see the troops marching along the road, but we would not necessarily march with them. We would report, but not join.” (p.103) This seems to be a maxim of Didion’s as well, as it exemplifies the kind of cool detachment that she brings to so many of her essays.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a good example of Didion’s style, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to her work—read Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album first.