Play It As It Lays

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Description

A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking.
Benny called for a round of Cuba Libres and I gave him some chips to play for me and went to the ladies room and never came back.

Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeths life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, anesthetized to pain and please, Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires and motives the epitome of a generation made ill by too much freedom.

Reviews

She writes with a razor You are both frightened and astonished It seems to me just about perfect, so heartbreaking and inescapable New York Times

Didions modant lucidity is like L.A. sunlight, a thing so bright sometimes it hurts Time, Top 100 Novels of All Time

For a few decades, this was my favourite modern American novel revelatory Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho

Author Bio

Joan Didion is one of America's most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.