Play It As It Lays Study Guide

Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. In her senior year at the University of California, Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and was awarded a job at the magazine’s New York office. Didion worked at Vogue from 1956 to 1964, eventually becoming a contributing writer and assistant features editor. She met her future husband, John Gregory Dunne, also a writer, while living in New York; in fact, Dunne edited her first novel, Run, River (1963).  The couple married in 1964, relocated to Southern California, and adopted their daughter, Quintana, in 1966. The couple wrote magazine pieces during this period, and Didion published her first nonfiction book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), which is considered to be one of the most important books of the 1960s. She published her second novel, Play It as It Lays, in 1970. In the 1970s, Didion and Dunne collaborated on a number of screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971) and a film adaptation of Play It as It Lays (1972). Didion published her third novel, A Book of Common Prayer, in 1977, and the couple returned to New York in the 1990s. Didion’s life took a tragic turn in 2003, when Quintana became critically ill, and Dunne suffered a fatal heart attack in December. Didion recounts her experiences pf mourning Dunne’s death while caring for Quintana in her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, which received the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Despite a promising year of recovery, Quintana suffered a series of additional health crises and died in 2005, at age 39. Didion wrote a subsequent memoir, Blue Nights (2011) about Quintana. Didion was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2013 by President Barack Obama, and in 2017, she was the subject of a documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne, called Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. Didion died in Manhattan on December 23, 2021, at age 87.

The disillusionment Didion explores in Play It as It Lays is better understood within the context of 1960s America, where the optimism of the early 1960s surrendered to the civil unrest, war, and disillusionment that characterized the latter half of the decade. In the famous acceptance speech he delivered to the 1960 Democratic National Convention, President John F. Kennedy placed the United States “on the edge of a New Frontier” and called on its citizens to become “pioneers” who would explore the “uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.” While Kennedy’s words packed a rhetorical punch, his utopian vision of a new world failed to manifest. Despite the milestones of social progress and innovation the U.S. witnessed over the course of the 1960s, the violence and division that took hold of the country irreparably marred Kennedy’s earlier vision of an idyllic New Frontier. 1968, in particular, was a year of unprecedented violence. In March, American soldiers tortured and slaughtered most of the village of My Lai in a massacre that would become one of the most egregious attacks on unarmed citizens to be committed during the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Junior’s assassination in April 1968 resulted in heightened racial tensions and riots, effectively ending the Civil Rights Era. And in August, police brutalized anti-war protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The United States as it existed in the late 1960s was a country that had tried and failed to manifest Kennedy’s imagined New Frontier, signifying a broader failure of the country’s institutions to enact real change, unify its people, and make order from disorder. This broader atmosphere of chaos, pessimism, and senseless violence plays out on a more personal scale in Play it as it Lays, as Maria (the protagonist) struggles to find purpose in a world that seems meaningless and full of random suffering.

Joan Didion has published four novels in addition to Play It as It Lays. Like Play It as It Lays, Didion’s first novel, Run, River (1963) is set in midcentury California and explores the loneliness and betrayal that develop over the course of a marriage. Although not a work of fiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Didion’s first published essay collection, examines the themes of disillusionment, disorder, and meaninglessness that are central to Play It as It Lays. The essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem depict a California that has come undone in its efforts to wrestle with the momentous social and political changes that developed over the 1960s. It reassesses the optimistic promise of a better, more unified world that characterized the earlier part of the decade, in light of increased political polarization and the brutality of the Vietnam War. The nihilism that Didion presents in Play It as It Lays is very much in conversation with the despair and disillusionment that took hold of the United States in the 1960s. Finally, Nathanael West’s satirical novel The Day of the Locust (1939) offers another literary take on Hollywood’s disillusioning and corruptive nature.