Play It As It Lays

FSG Classics

Ruthless, elegant, and razor-sharp, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays lays bare the desolation beneath America’s glittering surface in the late 1960s. Through her cool, unflinching prose, Didion captures the collapse of meaning in a world addicted to illusion—Hollywood’s hollow glamour, Las Vegas’s mechanical thrills, and the endless vacancy of the Mojave Desert.

At its center is Maria Wyeth, a woman unraveling under the weight of a life that no longer makes sense. Her story—told in fragments as spare and scorching as the landscape she drifts through—is both an indictment and an elegy: of fame, freedom, and the quiet despair of a generation searching for something real.

Decades after its release, Play It as It Lays remains one of the most unsettling and incisive portraits of American emptiness—its beauty undiminished, its truth still cutting close to the bone.