Play It as It Lays was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1970, and it is Didion’s most formally radical work of fiction — a novel written in fragments, some only a paragraph long, that mirror the psychological disintegration of its protagonist, Maria Wyeth. Maria is an actress and model in Hollywood whose marriage is dissolving, whose daughter is institutionalized, and whose sense of meaning has entirely collapsed. She drives the freeways compulsively, sleepwalks through parties, submits to an abortion she does not want, and moves toward a breakdown that feels less like a dramatic event than like the logical conclusion of a life without purpose.
The novel’s brilliance is formal. The short chapters — some only a sentence or two — create a reading experience that is itself fragmented: the reader, like Maria, cannot sustain attention, cannot construct a coherent narrative, cannot find the thread that connects one moment to the next. This is not experimental fiction for its own sake; it is form perfectly matched to content. Maria’s world has broken into disconnected pieces, and the novel’s structure enacts that fragmentation rather than merely describing it.
The Hollywood setting is not incidental. Didion uses the entertainment industry — its vacancy, its disposability, its treatment of women as objects — as a distilled version of American culture’s larger emptiness. Maria’s breakdown is not purely personal; it is the individual manifestation of a cultural condition.
The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been continuously in print since publication.
Collecting Play It as It Lays
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1970): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in fine jacket: $300–$800
- Signed first edition: $800–$2,000
- Reading copy without jacket: $20–$50