Play It as It Lays

Maria Wyeth, thirty-one and unemployed, narrates her own commitment to a psychiatric facility from inside it — tracing back through a childhood in a dying Nevada gambling town, a failed acting career in New York, and a marriage to director Carter Lang that gave her roles in his films before collapsing entirely. Their daughter Kate is institutionalized with unspecified disabilities, a fact Maria can barely look at directly.

Separated from Carter, Maria spends her days driving the freeways of Southern California to outrun her own anxiety, then undergoes an illegal abortion Carter forces on her as leverage over access to Kate. Grief and numbness curdle into isolation, alcohol, and pills, culminating in a devastating night when a friend dies in her arms. Joan Didion's spare, fragmented 1970 novel is a landmark of the era's literary nihilism.