Joan Didion (1934–2021)

She always runs away. She always leaves. This is the observation made by Warren, the ex-husband of Charlotte Douglas who is the protagonist of Joan Didion’s third novel A Book of Common Prayer. Following up on her two previous novels, ones in which the female protagonists suffer because they refuse to take command of their lives, Didion takes a turn in the opposite direction here. Maybe you can say that Charlotte doesn’t end up any better off because of her decisiveness. In fact she gets show more killed at the beginning of the novel whereas the wives in Run River and Play It As It Lays both survive, albeit under unenviable circumstances.

The narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, is an obvious stand-in for Joan Didion. She lives in the fictional Central American nation of Boca Grande where she is connected directly to the government due to her ex-husband’s ownership of a palm oil plantation which happens to be the biggest business in the tiny country. Grace is a former anthropologist who abandons her career because she can never understand human motivations even though she has a sharp perception of human behavior. She changes to a biologist mid-career since organic molecules are easier to understand. They have no subjectivity and only respond to stimuli. This is a clear explanation of Didion’s literary style; in a truly postmodern sense, all her writings concern interactions between surface appearances as opposed to depth and inner meaning. As such, Grace bears witness to Charlotte’s life and death without examining her subjective mind. Yet despite this avoidance of explanation, meaning does emerge in the patterns of Charlotte’s behavior.

During one of the frequent revolutionary coups that make Boca Grande’s politics and economy so unstable, Charlotte gets gunned down on the street. The killing is used as an internal narrative frame. The content of Charlotte’s life up until the time of her death is the content of most of the novel.

A second narrative frame is introduced just after the killing at the beginning and closes at the end of the book after the story of Charlotte’s life finishes. This tells the story of Charlotte’s daughter Marin. This introduction of a second framing device that ends outside the parameters of the first framing device is one way that Didion creates a decentered narrative, one that makes the story feel fractured as though it is falling apart rather than coming together. The non-linear narrative that jumps around between different places and times in seemingly random order, along with reoccurring lines of dialog and thought echoing and repeating throughout the text, heighten the confusion and disorganization. It’s like the pieces of the novel are painted onto glass panels that have been shattered and you follow the story by examining each one and trying to imagine how they once all fit together. This is a good example of how a narrative structure can reflect the theme of its subject.

Marin’s presence is absent from the initial passage that introduces her character when Charlotte meets with her husband Leonard and her ex-husband, also Marin’s father, Warren in her house in San Francisco. The FBI is there because they are looking for Marin due to the daughter’s involvement in a terrorist bombing in San Francisco followed by the hijacking and destruction of an airplane in Utah. Marin has gone underground and disappeared, although it is likely Leonard knows where she is all along. Leonard is a lawyer in high standing with revolutionaries because of his dedication to defending Leftist activist groups in court. He has deep ties to revolutionary factions in Latin America. Or does he actually work for the CIA?

The ex-husband Warren, on the other hand, is the worst possible husband. A professor of English literature from New Orleans, he is obnoxious, mean, racist, manipulative, and violent. Chronically drunk, he has a nasty habit of slapping and punching women who don’t cooperate with him. He is the kind of guy who would never have survived the #MeToo movement. But Warren understands Charlotte more than anybody else in the novel. He may not have any insight into her psyche, but he does know one thing Charlotte always does: run away. As we learn more about their marriage, it is clear that he gave her good reason to run away. But he also recognizes that running away is her habitual reaction to any situation she finds herself in. That is why he has an ulterior motive in coming to San Francisco. He wants to reconnect with Charlotte and coaxes her to visit him in New Orleans to see his brother. Warren claims his brother is dying of cancer, but in actuality it is Warren who is dying of cancer. Of course Charlotte goes. Warren knows she will run away from her absentee husband Leonard. She is easy prey and he wants one last fling before he dies. The result is a predictable disaster.

Charlotte ends up in Boca Grande where she makes an effort to be sociable with everyone although she stands out and never fits in any where. It is here that she meets the narrator Grace who befriends her, protects her, and tries to understand her. That task is not easy. Charlotte spends her days at the coffee shop in the airport, believing that her daughter Marin will be arriving by plane even though she never does. Some well-connected people think she is a CIA agent since the embassy alerted them to her presence and warned that she is of protected status by unofficial US law. She also reads propaganda pamphlets distributed by the CIA and makes late night phone calls to San Francisco for Northern California weather reports. The police think these are coded messages although we never find out what they are all about. She is also friendly with a group of Leftist activists that arrive from the USA and other parts of Latin America. Yet Grace observes that she has no understanding of what any of these people are up to. Grace’s most important observation is that Charlotte lives in the mental space of how she wants the world to be which is distinctly cut off from the way the world really is.

As rumors of a coup circulate, Charlotte’s husband Leonard arrives in Boca Grande to convince her to leave before the revolution breaks out. But he fails since Charlotte has decided to stop running away from life and stay where she is, working in a medical clinic that serves the people of Boca Grande. As all Americans are evacuated from the country, Charlotte stays and continues going to work even though a bomb has gone off at the clinic. She insists she is politically neutral in any situation whatsoever and is oblivious to the danger surrounding her. All that remains of her life at this point is the stubborn refusal to not run away anymore. And that is how she gets shot dead in the street. It’s probable that the revolutionaries kill her because they think she is an intelligence agent. Whether or not this is true is unclear, but in this case perceptions matter more than reality. Grace offers no explanation for any of her of this, but as a reader I conclude that Charlotte lived an uninformed life, relying on her instincts alone and in the end her instincts failed. She couldn’t hold her life together and her intuition didn’t save her when it should have.

As for the political situation, Charlotte doesn’t understand it and she doesn’t want to understand it. Neither does anyone else. The coup in Boca Grande is never explained because it doesn’t serve any definite purpose. It’s led by a bunch of bored young people and gets put down by another counter-revolutionary army of bored young people. All these bored young people are attached to the wealthy family that rules Boca Grande. Mixed up in this guerilla warfare are a bunch of American kids and Leonard, the lawyer who got rich by defending political activists in court. None of these people have a coherent ideology. They just have nothing better to do with themselves. Joan Didion, the lifelong Republican, had a low opinion of the American counter culture. If you’ve read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” you’ll know what I mean.

After fleeing Boca Grande and returning to the United States, Grace tracks down Charlotte’s daughter Marin who is hiding in a safehouse for activists in Buffalo, New York. Sullen and defensive, the young terrorist refuses to discuss her parents, Charlotte and Warren. After learning both of them are dead, she reacts by spewing out rhetoric about the revolution and the defeat of the bourgeoisie. Her rhetoric is a protective armor, sheltering her from the troubles of the outside world by escaping into fantasies about guerilla warfare. When Grace pierces this armor, Marin breaks down in tears. What is revealed is the disconnection between her and her parents who never provided her with the emotional support she needed. The implication is that Warren abused her and Charlotte ran away from her. Most likely, Marin found the support she craved in the politics of Leonard, Charlotte’s second husband, and the activist movements he associates with.

This novel is Joan Didion at her best. She builds on the fractured narrative style of her previous two novels simply by adding in more thematic elements and layers. This is also accomplished by using the first person narrative of Grace as a metanarrative that explains the author’s intentions. Grace’s function is to show without telling. She offers almost no explanations of what happens and allows room for the reader to piece everything together for themselves. The story is all on the surface, but the fragments of the story all point the reader in the direction of its meaning. Grace gives up on anthropology because she can’t understand human motivations. She sees only patterns of behavior and tells the story in this way. She becomes a biologist because she can understand why molecules interact they way they do and, again, she writes about human behavior in this way. Mid-novel she begins using metaphors derived from molecular biology to describe the behavior of the characters. But it is through the reader’s observation of behavioral patterns, how some patterns repeat and then get shattered from outside interference, that explanatory motivations reveal themselves. Grace’s narrative doesn’t tell us what Charlotte’s or Marin’s motivations are, but she does point your attention in the right direction and lets you draw the conclusions. This is a successful way of writing about surfaces so the reader can see through the cracks at what lies underneath. This is showing without telling.

After finishing A Book of Common Prayer it may be obvious that Joan Didion wrote the same kind of book over and over again. Her stories are all about a shallow woman who lives by her wits and instincts alone. She has trouble making decisions and gets tossed around by unseen forces that are remote and yet more powerful than she is. She sees the world solely from her own flawed point of view. And to what extent is Joan Didion writing from an autobiographical perspective? I don’t know. Her novels are without heroes, but maybe there is some kind of strength in their weaknesses. But I do know you might be tempted to cast a critical eye of judgment on her characters. Then the question remains: aren’t her characters a lot more like us than we would like to admit? By reading her novels, aren’t we looking at ourselves in the shards of shattered mirrors whether we like it or not? How many of us truly understand ourselves or the world we live in? Maybe she’s telling us to be more cautious in our approach to other human beings. show less

Joan Didion's prose is like a sunset. Slow, beautiful, yet so natural it doesn't seem forced or showy. This is a memoir of sorrow and morning. It is as though the words themselves are reluctant to recall such sadness. In it, Didion remembers her daughter's life and untimely death and the odd process of living on when it seems that one ought to have died. Gorgeous and haunting.

There’s an old joke that goes, “How do you say ‘I love you’ in New York? Fuck you. How do you say ‘fuck you’ in California? I love you.” That’s the cultural climate in which Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays takes place. But while that cultural climate is important for the story, it isn’t the main point the author addresses.

Maria is one problem of a woman. She addresses the reader directly in the first person during the opening monologue. From that we learn about the show more novel’s two elemental metaphors: gambling and rattlesnakes. Maria approaches life as a game of chance. The gambler at the roulette wheel acts without agency over the ball; it just lands where it lands and the player has to accept the result whatever that may be. The gambler “plays it as it lays”. The other, more subtle metaphor is that life will bite you whether you like it or not. Rattlesnakes are hiding, biting anyone who is unlucky enough to cross their paths. But rattlesnakes don’t ordinarily attack people. They only bite when provoked so the best way to avoid getting bitten is to play it as it lays. Just avoid getting involved. Knowing this puts Maria into a permanent state of anxiety. After getting bit once, she is expecting another bite to come at some random time. One other detail we learn from Mariah’s opening monologue is that she doesn’t care at all about motivations or explanations. What happens happens and the reason behind it doesn’t matter. Everything is on the surface. Joan Didion, as a master of irony, uses Mariah’s monologue to explain what motivates the protagonist to approach life without the understanding of her own motivations.

Maria’s opening monologue is followed by two other monologues. One is that of her closest friend Helene. The other is that of her husband Carter. From these two we learn that neither of them understand Maria, but they both perceive her as mentally unstable. And although they are the two closest people in her life, both of them are emotionally distant and more like caretakers who put up with her out of a sense of duty more than from genuine interest. There are also subtle foreshadowings of the affair between Helene and Carter, as well as the death of Helene’s husband BZ, all of which culminate at the end of the story.

As a writing technique, the three separate introductory monologues function effectively in presenting three separate perspectives on Maria. This may sound too obvious to be worth mentioning, but what is unique about it is the way the novel shifts back to Maria in the first person throughout the rest of the book. Keeping this in mind, the reader follows Maria’s subjectivity through the lens of two other characters who see her from inaccurate perspectives she can not see herself. Considering that Didion’s style in this novel is called minimalist by some, the perception of depth and multi-dimensionalism in the narrative are heightened. This minimalist irony is taken a step further in that the people surrounding Maria in her life aren’t much more introspective than she is. They aren’t deep thinking. They aren’t analytical people. They just do what they do and when Maria doesn’t make sense to them, they leave her to herself and do soemthing else.

So who are these people? Carter is a film maker. Maria is his wife. They live in Los Angeles. Maria has starred in two movies, but mostly she doesn’t do much. In a haze of tranquilizers and alcohol, she lays by the pool or drives endlessly on the LA freeways in her corvette while listening to the radio. The main source of meaning in her otherwise pointless life is her daughter who lives in a home for mentally disabled children.

One movie Maria starred in was a short experimental film made by Carter. The whole film is close up shots of Maria going about her daily life. She is the only element of the film. The other movie she starred in was made by BZ, Helene’s husband who is also a film maker who sometimes delves into directing pornography. The latter movie stars Maria as the woman in a biker gangbang. BZ describes it as a movie where the female subject is nothing more than a prop since the gangbang is all about the bikers using her body to fulfill their homosexual desires for each other.

Both films are pivotal in understanding Maria because they negate her as a human being in two fundamentally opposing ways. Carter’s film is entirely about her surface, showing only how she appears and what she does with no examination of her subjective life. In the other film, her humanity is negated because, as BZ describes it, she disappears in a screen full of cocks. Inexplicably, Maria claims that BZ’s biker movie is her favorite because it is the one in which her character has the most agency. It is an ironic statement coming from a woman who convinces herself she is refusing to exercise agency in her own life. I say “convincing herself” because she actually does display agency all throughout the book.

Maria does exercise agency when she goes to visit her daughter unannounced at the home for disabled children. The caretaker at the home, however, berates her for not making an appointment because a spontaneous visit like that disrupts her routine and can upset the girl’s stability. Maria also chooses to take her daughter to a Christmas celebration at her ffriends’ mansion, but this results in disaster when her daughter becomes violent.

Maria also exercises agency when she takes trips to Las Vegas to escape from the miseries of life in Los Angeles. On one trip, she randomly encounters her godfather in a casino. The man gives her his phone number and post office box address so she can contact him later. On another trip back to Las Vegas, she tries calling him only to find out the number is invalid. She tries to contact him again by waiting at the post office for several days in hopes he will show up to retrieve his mail from his PO box. But after waiting, Maria learns that the box is rented, not by her godfather, but by an insane woman who doesn’t know him.

Another significant example of Maria exercising agency is when she gets pregnant while cheating on her husband. Carter gives her a choice between having an abortion or divorce. He qualifies the latter option by telling her that he will get custody over their daughter if she chooses to break up with him. Although Carter’s intention is manipulative, he does offer a choice. Since Maria’s daughter is the only thing she cares about in her life, she chooses the abortion. That procedure, illegal at the time of publication, proved to be psychologically traumatic for Maria. Here we see how a pattern in her life emerges: every time Maria tries to exert control over her circumstances, something rotten happens as a result. Every time the rattlesnake bites.

That is a pattern that explains why Maria is the way she is. She runs away from choices and responsibilities because every choice she makes damages her. She numbs the pain with drugs and alcohol in an attempt to erase her mind and emotions. She becomes anhedonic, unable to feel pain or pleasure, living the life of a lobotomy victim or a zombie. For her this is a defense mechanism against the entanglements of the world; for the others in her life, it is a sign of mental illness in a woman having a nervous breakdown. Probably both perspectives are accurate.

And yet another side of Maria is revealed when she visits the supermarket. In the store, she recognizes a crowd of other Southern Californian women whose lives are just as empty and pointless as hers. She recognizes them because they all pirchase the same grocery items. Therefore she consciously chooses to buy groceries that differ from them in an attempt to differentiate herself. It is a form of camouflage. She wants to conceal her similarities to the other lonely shoppers, but there is also a touch of pride in her cover as though she wants to individuate herself in some way. Since the other people in the store can’t see her motivations, if they even notice her at all, this can be little more than a private pleasure. No matter how trivial it is, it is still an attempt at clinging on to some sense of self-worth. Maria also takes a small turn in her rejections of casual sex in Las Vegas towards the end of the novel.

But any subtle changes in Maria are destined to go unnoticed by Helene, Carter, BZ or anybody else around her because they are inattentive to her feelings to begin with. Her husband and friends go out to a remote location in the desert of Nevada and drag her along with them because Carter worries she is losing her grip on reality. Once there, they leave her in the hotel room during the days when they are on a movie set filming a western. Maria mostly stays in a drugged stupor while staying in bed. She finds common ground with BZ who comes to her in despair because Helen and Carter are having an affair and not trying to hide it. Both BZ and Helene have hit rock bottom and BZ tries to convince Maria to overdose on pills with him. He dies in bed beside her but she lives because she refused to kill herself. Suicide would entail taking control over her situation so she does nothing. Ironically, playing it as it lays is what saves her in the end.

On one level, this novel is about the shallow lives of rich people in Hollywood working in the film industry. Maria is surrounded by friends and family acting out of self-interest and brute instinct without any awareness of what is going on with the people around them. Maria’s relationship to them is toxic and dysfunctional. It is through their ignorance that they negate her humanity, treating her like little more than an appendage. And yet they say they love her. Joan Didion’s opinion of the upper crust in California is made clear. On another level, this novel is a character study of a woman who doesn’t have much character whilE in the middle of an existential crisis. But Maria isn’t really on a downward spiral because she was at the bottom to begin with. That’s a shocking statement about somebody with wealth, privilege, and an endless amount of leisure time. She also tries to negate her own humanity by refusing to take control by avoiding choices and letting life happen to her. Despite that, her humanity keeps emerging. Her attempts at self-negation are deliberate, but what I think Joan Didion is demonstrating is that there is something about humanity that can’t be submerged, negated, or denied out of existence no matter how hard people may try. Maria attempts to delude herself into thinking she has no self-awareness or capacity to choose, and yet she keeps making choices in matters that reveal she does have some kind of self-knowledge, albeit self-knowledge that is partially hidden from her conscious mind.

Play It As It Lays could be a 1970s American echo of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, the novel I would argue is the most sadly misinterpreted book of the 20th century. Maria is a lot like Mersault in that she lives the life of a nihilist. It is a life that lacks quality because, like Mersault, she avoids taking control and minimizes her willingness to make choices. Both characters live a pointless, empty existence. But just as so many readers misinterpret Mersault as being some kind of hero, I fear a lot of readers will misinterpret Maria as being a woman who is hopelessly lost in the world. It all depends on how conscientious you are in paying attention to subtle details. If you pay close enough attention, you will notice the abundance of times Joan Didion mentions rattlesnakes in this story. If you read quickly and don’t pay attention, you won’t. If you read carefully enough to be aware of all the rattlesnakes, you should be able to see all the subtle signs that Maria has more agency than you realize. In that there is humanity and in that there is hope. If you only see Maria through the eyes of Helene and Carter then you haven’t understood Joan Didion’s message. The less like them you are, the better off you will be in life anyhow. show less

this is really beautiful, and not in the way that i generally find books beautiful. her writing is great but it's not particularly lyrical, it's just so, so good. the way she writes this experience, the way her memories weave between the mundane and the extraordinary awfulness of grief is expertly done. i thought this was such a hard and important book and one that i'm going to save to return to when it's my turn for grief to come to me. i imagine it will feel like being seen and understood show more in such a crucial way.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing.' A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to 'get through it,' rise to the occasion, exhibit the 'strength' that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact that (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself." show less