Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

Max McKenna (Freie Universität Berlin)

Ed. by Sofia Ahlberg, Uppsala University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1970

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

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Joan Didion’s breakout novel

Play It as It Lays

(1970) offers a dark, neo-modernist take on the Hollywood of the 1960s. Over nearly ninety short and often disconnected chapters, Didion relates the events leading up to actress Maria Wyeths’s involvement in the suicide of her friend BZ, a closeted gay film producer. A standout entry into the canon of Hollywood novels,

Play It as It Lays

might likewise be considered a paradigmatic

freeway novel

. Didion’s text inverts the fantasies of conventional American road narratives, like Jack Kerouac’s

On the Road

(1957), in which mostly male travelers set out across the heartland in search of themselves and of male camaraderie and freedom from domestic responsibility.

Play It as It Lays

attests to the more complex and coercive reality of…

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1310 words

Citation: McKenna, Max. "Play It as It Lays". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 August 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2773, accessed 08 September 2024.]

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Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

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