Why Every Woman in their 20s Should Read Joan Didion

I came under the sway of Joan Didion’s writing somewhere in the fluorescently lit hallways of my college library. Didion, who is 86 years old, came into reverence in the 1960s and ‘70s with the publication of works, both fiction and non-, that captured the zeitgeist with an honesty that, at some point during the 20th century, was rendered unimportant. Her recent works, notably two autobiographical works about grief and loss, ring with that same honesty. It is the sharpness of this honesty according to which Didion has carved for herself a place in the modern canon of impactful writers generally, and impactful female writers specifically.

Play it As it Lays was one of her early works of fiction, published in 1970. And although it is a work of fiction set in the time at which it was written, it is not necessarily specific to that time, nor does it exist outside of any realm of possibility. From a New York Times review written upon its publication, “What makes the world of this novel…so heartbreaking and inescapable is Miss Didion’s selection of details. There is nothing superfluous, not a word, not an incident.” The world Didion constructs is that of aspiring actors and directors living in and around “hollywood” during the era of hippydom. What we come to know, or perhaps already did—maybe because Didion, in other works, paints this time very clearly—is that all of the “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” true to that time were just a means of subduing immense pain.

Maria Wyeth has been subdued. Maria, (pronounced “Mar-eye-ah”, she tells us) is the novel’s main character, if you can call her that, because really, the novel moves around her. The novel is told, for the most part, from the perspective of a narrator who peers into Maria’s life as if intrusively, but not in any commanding sort of way. This diverges from the other voices in Maria’s life, those of the people by whom she is surrounded, who are at once intrusive and commanding. Only at the beginning of the novel and then, increasingly toward the end, but in small ways, we hear Maria speak for herself. As Maria speaks, mostly, but not exclusively to men, you get the impression that she is speaking to no one. The conversation moves around her, avoids her words like one might avoid a pothole in the road and carries on unimpeded. (Opening of chapter 34) By what Maria has been subdued is described by Didion only as “the notion of general devastation.”

In some ways, Maria is what I fear most becoming, a passive observer of my own life. “Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes” Maria remarks somewhere inside the walls of a neuropsychiatric hospital. And in some ways, Maria is what women are at risk of becoming. “What no Didion heroine can entirely reconcile herself to is the split between what she wants and what a woman is supposed to do: marry, have children, and keep her marriage together, despite the inevitable philandering, despite her other hopes and dreams.” (The New Yorker) What we come to find out is that Maria never made for herself a decision. This is elucidated in a conversation with a woman who runs a small cafe in a small town on the edge of the desert in Nevada. Maria finds herself in the Nevada desert often throughout her life. It is where she was raised and where she returns to with her then ex-husband Carter who is shooting a movie there. There is nothing in Nevada. It is a cemetery of long-dead dreams, occupied by people for whom what came in on the next roll was not better than what went out on the last.” (3) It is the place where people become the product of choices that they did not make, the product of circumstance, the product of luck, or its absence.

It sometimes frightens me to think that we become our choices when I think of all the choices I have made that were not my own. Maria becomes the product of choices that were not her own. And she acts according to the interests of others. Carter wishes her to get the abortion, so she does. Les Goodwin wishes Maria to make him happy, and Maria does. The actor from that party wants to have sex with her, and so they do. There is no compliance in each of these actions, but rather a bone-chilling indifference as if Maria stopped caring about having autonomy in her own life many years prior to the story’s beginning. It is a sort of passivity, emotionlessness, that would be reminiscent of the man in The Stranger if only Maria had been a man. But it is in fact made sadder by the fact she is not. As if Meursault had the opportunity to care, but Maria never did. “Play It as It Lays…comes as close as any book has come to representing what repression does to the soul.” (The New Yorker)

At its heart, Play It As It Lays relays the reality that things happen, and there are no answers. What is so stark about this realization is that how it comes to be true for Didion in her own life upon the death of her husband, and the death of her daughter. “Life changes in an instant, the ordinary instant.” Didion herself is a starkly different character than Maria. Didion has made decisions. Maria has not. Didion was in a loving marriage. Maria was not. Didion became a success in her field. Maria succumbed to the pressures of hers. And nonetheless, the two find themselves equally at the mercy of life’s random, uncontrollable sadness. However, if it is true, as Maria claims, that nothing applies, then shouldn’t it be true of all things. What Didion exposes, then, is the rules we adhere to—from the side of the road we drive on to the roles dictated by gender and sexuality—are arbitrary. They don’t apply.

It is not inevitable that we, women, end up like Maria. In the same way that Didion used honesty as a means to carve herself into the literary landscape forever, we have the power to carve ourselves into the life that we most desire. All we have to do, it seems, is wake up and decide for ourselves what this is. Because ultimately, there are no rules but the ones we create.