Ep 703 - Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion

Summary

Overdue Podcast Episode Summary: "Play It As It Lays" by Joan Didion

Episode Details:

• Podcast: Overdue
• Host: Andrew and Craig
• Book Discussed: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
• Release Date: May 19, 2025

---

1. Introduction

In Episode 703 of Overdue, hosted by Andrew and Craig from Headgum, the duo delves into Joan Didion's seminal work, Play It As It Lays. As part of their mission to explore books from their extensive backlog, the hosts unpack the layers of Didion's narrative, offering listeners both seasoned and new insights into the novel's enduring relevance.

---

2. Background on Joan Didion and "Play It As It Lays"

Joan Didion, a luminary in American literature, is renowned for her incisive essays and novels that capture the essence of American culture and personal turmoil. Play It As It Lays, published in 1970, stands as a critical examination of Hollywood's superficialities and the existential despair of its protagonist, Marcia.

Notable Quote:

Andrew: "[02:43]... Play it as it lays by Joan Didion is kind of a good motto to live by here in May of 2025."

---

3. Overview of "Play It As It Lays"

The novel centers on Maria Wyeth, a former actress grappling with a disintegrating marriage, a young daughter in institutional care, and a pervasive sense of alienation. Set against the backdrop of Hollywood, the story navigates Maria's descent into emotional and psychological disarray.

---

4. Themes Explored

Nihilism and Despair: Andrew and Craig discuss the pervasive nihilism in the novel, highlighting how Marcia's existential crisis mirrors broader societal disillusionment.

Hollywood Critique: The authors illustrate Didion's scathing portrayal of Hollywood as a bastion of decay, populated by "copycat movies, predatory men, hacks, and hangers-on."

Personal Struggles: Maria's internal battles with her identity, relationships, and purpose form the emotional core of the narrative.

Notable Quote:

Craig: "[17:36]... play it as it lays suggests that such nostalgia is misplaced, even counterproductive. So maybe the good old days wasn't so good."

---

5. Stylistic Elements

Narrative Structure: Didion employs a blend of first-person and close third-person perspectives, creating an intimate yet detached portrayal of Maria's experiences. The novel's vignette-style chapters offer fragmented glimpses into the protagonist's life, enhancing the sense of disintegration.

Use of Vignettes: Short, episodic chapters serve as narrative snapshots, each contributing to the overarching themes without adhering to a traditional linear plot.

Dialogue and Mood: The conditional mood in dialogues allows characters to express possibilities and regrets without delving into direct confrontations, adding to the novel's introspective tone.

Notable Quote:

Craig: "[26:14]... she does a lot a lot of it throughout the book. They pick up in speed towards the latter third or so."

---

6. Character Analysis

Maria Wyeth: A complex protagonist, Maria embodies the struggles of maintaining identity amidst personal and professional turmoil. Her interactions reveal a deep-seated disconnect from those around her and a futile search for meaning.

Carter: Maria's husband, Carter, represents the often exploitative nature of Hollywood relationships. His infidelities and professional ambitions exacerbate Maria's feelings of isolation.

BZ and Helene: These supporting characters provide contrasting relationships for Maria, each highlighting different facets of her emotional state and societal observations.

---

7. Reception and Critical Analysis

LA Times Review: Matt Brennan, writing for the LA Times in 2024, praises the novel for its "ruthless precision" in depicting a decaying film industry and its uncanny relevance to contemporary Hollywood issues.

New York Times Review: While acknowledging Didion's literary prowess, a 1970s New York Times review critiques the novel as a "bad novel by a very good writer," suggesting a possible disconnect between Didion's intent and reader reception.

Notable Quote:

Andrew: "[63:50]... her writing in here is very good. Maybe you find something to value in, like, the larger, you know, the bigger picture, and maybe you don't, but you can't deny that it is a talented mind that is putting all these words together."

---

8. Hosts' Perspectives and Insights

Andrew and Craig draw parallels between Play It As It Lays and contemporary media, referencing works like Mulholland Drive and BoJack Horseman to underscore the novel's timeless exploration of Hollywood's facade.

Notable Quote:

Craig: "[65:05]... this book made me think of Mulholland Drive a lot, which is a movie I watched for the first time, like, three months ago."

---

9. Conclusion

Play It As It Lays emerges as a poignant exploration of personal and societal collapse, masterfully narrated through Didion's distinctive stylistic choices. Andrew and Craig commend the novel's unassailable writing quality, even as they acknowledge its bleak thematic landscape. The episode serves as both an introduction for newcomers and a deep dive for longtime admirers of Joan Didion's work.

Closing Quote:

Andrew: "[66:48]... and you can't deny that it is a talented mind that is putting all these words together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."

---

10. Additional Resources

For listeners eager to explore more about the podcast or the discussed book:

• Podcast Website: OverduePodcast.com
• Next Book: Cursed Bread by Sophie Macintosh
• Patreon Support: Patreon.com/overduepod

---

Note: This summary intentionally omits advertisements and non-essential segments to focus solely on the content surrounding Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays.

Transcript

[Andrew]

This is a headgum podcast.

[Craig]

Andrew. Summer is just around the corner.

[Andrew]

Sure is.

[Craig]

And the folks at Mint Mobile have a hot take. Getting a summer bod is out. Getting your savings bod is in.

[Andrew]

What does that. What does that mean?

[Craig]

This spring and summer. I'll tell you. This spring and summer, we want skimpy wireless bills and fat wallets.

[Andrew]

With premium body shame. My wallet. Mint Mobile. Come on.

[Craig]

Premium wireless plans for just 15 bucks a month. You can have both without breaking a sweat or the bank. Now Andrew, you're a Mint Mobile user.

[Andrew]

Like I've been a Mint Mobile user for years and I honestly very rarely ever think about it. Except when I get the texts once a month that tell me that my data plan has renewed because the service is good and so I don't think about it.

[Craig]

That's exactly. That's how mobile should work.

[Andrew]

Yes, you shouldn't have to think about it. So say bye to your overpriced wireless plans. Jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. Mint Mobile is here to rescue you. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Download, Ditch overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month.

[Craig]

This year, skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get your summer savings and shop premium wireless [e-mail] overdue that's mintmobile.com overdue.

[Andrew]

Upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5 gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first 3 months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.

[Craig]

While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well told tale, they will not shy.

[Andrew]

Away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary.

[Craig]

Plus, these are books you should have read by now. Hey everybody, welcome to Overdue. It's a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig.

[Andrew]

My name is Andrew. Play it as it lays. I think the name of this week's book, which is Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion is kind of a good motto to live by here in May of 2025. Let's just play it as a lace.

[Craig]

Now as we discuss the book itself and the nihilism inherent to where the main character has landed and the sadness with which many of its characters live their daily lives that may not wind up being what we want to carry with us on a day to day here. But like the rest of it, just join me at the craps table, baby. Like let's just see what happens. It is, it is a. It's not a gambling book. But like they do ponder gambling as a metaphor a few times and they do. You know, there's some gambling with lives and hearts and I think some literal gambling here and there. But you know, it's the west coast, baby.

[Andrew]

That's all they do out there.

[Craig]

That's.

[Andrew]

I don't know, all they do is gamble with. With different. With different things.

[Craig]

We're going to.

[Andrew]

Sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively. This is our book podcast where every week one of us reads a book and tells the other person about it. Usually we do like a little bit or skit here at the start sometimes.

[Craig]

We used to do really long books.

[Andrew]

We used to do a lot. We're. For various reasons we're paying some attention to the old, old catalog, the elder episodes, the.

[Craig]

The old texts.

[Andrew]

Seeing some of our. Seeing how some of our stylistic things like improved or fell away over the years has been interesting.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

Yeah. This week. I don't know, just play it as a Laysman.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

My brain. My brain keeps wanting to make something of lay it as it plays. But that's not any. That's not anything. That's just switching the words. That's just the old switcheroo. I feel like that's nothing.

[Craig]

I feel like there's like a bad gaming magazine ad of like a cool guy on a Couc Genesis.

[Andrew]

A 90s like Sega Genesis ad campaign.

[Craig]

It's like, oh, lay. There's a place laid as it plays. It's in the game. And this. So this is a book about California.

[Andrew]

About California. Here we go.

[Craig]

Hollywood. I've never been to California, so I'm probably going to miss some stuff. Probably.

[Andrew]

I've been to California a bunch of times.

[Craig]

Yeah, sure. How do you feel about it?

[Andrew]

Some parts better. In other parts.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Do not like LA very much.

[Craig]

Sure.

[Andrew]

Frisco's okay. Frisco fine.

[Craig]

Sure. Frisco fine.

[Andrew]

San Jose, boring. Yeah. In the like mid. In the mid 2010s, Apple shifted from having big events in like a rented space that they got in like downtown San Francisco to doing stuff a little closer to where they're campus is which is. I mean it's in Cupertino. San Jose. San Jose is like the Airport Grande.

[Craig]

Cupertino, please.

[Andrew]

And like the only. Like there's not. There's just nothing oh, sure. So that's, that's a lot of my. My California is like, okay, I'm gonna work a 16 hour day and then I'm gonna find like one of two bars that I can just, like that will just let me come in and rest my head on the bar until I'm ready to go to sleep.

[Craig]

My understanding that many, many people live there and many, many people like living there. California.

[Andrew]

That's some of them.

[Craig]

If that's you listening, good for you.

[Andrew]

Tell them just some of them live to bust up California into a bunch of different little states.

[Craig]

Well, that Wikipedia article gets edited every two months by a very wishful person. But we're here to talk about Joan Didion. Essayist, novelist, essayist. Essayist.

[Andrew]

You said essayist.

[Craig]

Well, she's the essiest essayist.

[Andrew]

She doesn't have any S's in her name, which makes it not very essay at all, in my opinion.

[Craig]

Fair enough. She's also a screenwriter. There's the S I was looking for.

[Andrew]

Yes. Born 1934, died in 2021. Writer and journalist in the same cohort as Hunter S. Thompson and a bunch of others as part of the new journalism movement.

[Craig]

Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote. We should probably get around to Tom Wolfe at some point. I was thinking about reading that stuff.

[Andrew]

Sure. Maybe I'm just. We're going to get around to everything at this point. Pretty much everything. We're going to keep doing it for Late as a lace. So. Yeah, as you mentioned. Well, so the new journalism thing, I think we talked about it a little bit in our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas episode with Hunter S. Thompson, but it's just a movement that emphasize more like narrative building and personal perspective in storytelling.

[Craig]

Not, not full on gonzo journalism. She wasn't doing. No, no.

[Andrew]

But, but like making the writer and the writer's persp. Like a relevant.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

Part of the story instead of trying to make the. The writer vanish. I think that this approach is more honest generally than like pretending that a person reporting news can be fully, totally objective. But, you know, whatever. Yeah. She co wrote multiple screenplays, including the one for the 1972 adaptation of this book with her husband, John Gregory Dunn.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

Their third screenplay together was A Star is Born.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Which is. Which is neat.

[Craig]

Well, yeah, she's the rewrite of the.

[Andrew]

Old one, but not the new new one.

[Craig]

No, lady, the one she did had. Had Barbara in it. Barbra Streisand and what's his name. Somebody else.

[Andrew]

She won a National Book Award for nonfiction. Was a Finalist was a finalist for the Pulitzer. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal by Barack hussein Obama in 2013. And yet she is remembered best or most. I don't know which word is more relevant. For her Writing about the 1960s and the hippie counterculture about California in the 80s and 90s, she wrote a lot about US foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote an essay that put forward the case that the Central Park Five had been wrongly convicted. She was one of, if not the first, like mainstream media writer to be to like put that case out. Her New York Times obituary and this is a Wikipedia hole that I fell down for a while. And it's not that I haven't fell, fallen down this hole before, but it's just every time I'm near this hole, I jump back in it.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Is her New York Times obituary says she was descended from settlers who had traveled with the Donner Party for a while.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

But who had in I think July of like 1846 or whatever it was split from them to take the regular path instead of the new cool shortcut that led everybody into, you know, the Donner Party.

[Craig]

Yeah. Maybe they had some sort of foresight that would, you know, they knew what was going to happen.

[Andrew]

Who can say? Her early influences and this, a lot of this is from her New York Times obituary from 2021. Early influences included Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. She said that she had typed Hemingway chapters out herself to like see how they worked. Which is interesting to me.

[Craig]

Yeah. I don't know if the obit, I didn't get a chance to read it. There is a 2006 Paris Review interview that a lot of articles like cite.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Because she did not do like, you know, she did. She was, she was a member of the media for many years. She did a lot, a lot of book tours. But she was not super like forthcoming with the press. Did not do a lot of a ton of like super in depth interviews. So there, there are not a lot of, you know, you find the sources over and over again with some of this stuff. She got her start as a writer. She'd first submitted a short story to Mademoiselle magazine during her junior year at UC Berkeley and then won an essay contest at Vogue where she then went and worked for seven years. And she just wrote essays and stories for all kinds of media publications after that first novel was run river in 1963, was pretty well received. And then her next book, which is I think probably like the biggest, the big breakthrough book. Yeah. Her Nonfiction collection of magazine pieces called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which is all about hippie counterculture in California in the. In the late 1960s.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

Like, mid to late 1960s. Her. You know, her. Her career was so long and so storied that I'm kind of. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to go full Tarkington on this one. You can't really dive deep on as many specific little weird.

[Craig]

Well, also, we. We haven't talked to a professor who's been like, please shed more light on Joan Didion. More people need to know Joan Diddy.

[Andrew]

And Joan Didion seems to have roughly the level of fame that she.

[Craig]

I don't think she needs a glow up from us, you know.

[Andrew]

But she. Yeah. So the. The book that she ended up winning the National Book Award for, I believe was the Year of Magical Thinking, which happened in 2005. This was after her husband had died in 2003. And she wrote this during a period where her adopted daughter was ill and then eventually died in, I think, 2005 at the age of 39. So lots of working through feelings in this book. And then another memoir that came out in 2011 called Blue Nights, also deals with the. With some of the feelings from that. And, yeah, like, I. I have not really. I have not encountered her work before. Like, I did. I'm, you know, in passing. I've probably read some. Some articles and things, but I've not really read any books that she's written. This is. This is my first exposure to her.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Is listening to you tell me about it. It was a couple of minutes.

[Craig]

Interesting. Kind of looking back at her bibliography. Right. Because I real. I was like, why do I know Joan Diddy? And I'm not. I was not reading magazine pieces in the 60s and 70s. I'm not.

[Andrew]

The name. I know. Like, of course I know the name.

[Craig]

Yes. And I realized that, like, the main thing, actually, I knew, even though I haven't read it, is Year of Magical Thinking. It comes out in the aughts when we're in College. There's a 2007 stage adaptation that I think she wrote. Like, did the adaptation starring Vanessa Redgrave. It is like, everybody's talking about it. This is at a point in my life when I am, like, reading the New York Times theater section every day for both. Like, what if I'm gonna do this for my life? And also, they would occasionally just put random things from the New York Times theater section in the big test you take at the end of Kenyon's drama program. And you just, like, randomly have to know something from the news, even though no one ever talked about it in a single class.

[Andrew]

So bold. A bold choice.

[Craig]

Yeah. So I just remember, like, you know, and then I get out of school and I'm listening to, you know, podcast about theater, and this, like, play is just kind of looming. It's touring, whatever. And then another actor that I worked with a bunch when his wife passed several years after this, I remember him coming into a rehearsal, having read this book and, like, was just working through it with this kind of hand in hand.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

So I don't really think I even came into this other than, like, when we put it on the schedule, being like, oh, yeah, she's this, like, acerbic, insightful, like, lady from the 60s and 70s who is, like, tougher than her little. You know, many profiles are like, she's this little lady who.

[Andrew]

She's just a little lady who is.

[Craig]

Like, you know, peering into the soul of America and not liking what she sees. And it's just kind of interesting. There are plenty of writers we've encountered or, you know, other pop culture figures where you hit them at a different era than what made them famous. But that's like, oh, I know Joan Didion as the older writer that Vanessa Redgrave portrayed on stage and not the writer of a star.

[Andrew]

I've got some. Oh, go ahead.

[Craig]

Well, I was just gonna say, I think it was in the obit. I can't remember, probably the obit where they mentioned. For the first novel, Run River, Michiko Kakutani calls the protagonist the Didian woman. A clearly personal wasteland wandering along highways or through countries in an effort to blot out the pain of consciousness. And that is apparently kind of a recurring trope in her work, you know, this portrait of a particular woman in her fiction work. And that is definitely the type of person that is the lead of Play It As It Lays. So, yeah.

[Andrew]

And she. She is. She has said, I believe that this is not, like, particularly autobiographical. There are a couple of elements of it that you can draw a pretty clear line to, including the car.

[Craig]

Yeah, the car thing.

[Andrew]

The main character. But, yeah, like, it's. It would be. It's hard for me to imagine that you could have an archetype known as the Diddy and woman that is not, like, partly.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Who you are.

[Craig]

Especially when you're a new journalist and you're like, it's important that the reader kind of knows who I am.

[Andrew]

Yeah. You know, the only thing, like, I'd have about this book is sort of the way it still reflects Hollywood and the way that things have changed.

[Craig]

Oh sure.

[Andrew]

So things have not changed. I also have a contemporary 1970 New York Times review that we can talk about, like maybe once you're in there. Yeah, yeah, that's like the, the book part of the section. But I think this is, this is good to get into before the break to kind of lay groundwork.

[Craig]

Sure.

[Andrew]

This is from Matt Brennan in 2024, writing in the LA Times. The headline is what Joan Didion's Broken Hollywood can Teach Us about our own. And I just want to read some quotes that, that maybe can please do. Do some table setting. He says of this book, its defining motif in the form of freeway cloverleafs, coiled rattlesnakes, daily routines and calendrical rhythms is the spiral or loop. And with it she paints the picture of an industry in decay saturated with copycat movies, predatory men, hacks and hangers on. Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of Portrait is not the ruthless precision with which it, with which it renders the film business then, but the clarity with which it corresponds to the film business now. Its only real anachronisms to today's eyes are Maria or Mariah.

[Craig]

Is that Mariah?

[Andrew]

Yeah, Mariah's snobbish swipe at TV writers and the fifteen hundred dollar a month rent on her house in Beverly Hills.

[Craig]

Sure.

[Andrew]

And then he goes on to say it's easy with AI generated slime creeping through the cracks in our defenses and stories produced by battalions of workers disappeared at will with its middle class hollo out its influence on the Wayne, its bravest voices hounded by politicians and philistines to yearn for the Hollywood of yore. But play it as it lays suggests that such nostalgia is misplaced, even counterproductive. So maybe the good old days wasn't so good.

[Craig]

That's kind of. Yeah. This book is not arguing at all for a good old days. It is arguing for a nowadays pretty bad.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And then, and then people now who are like man, the good old days in the, in the 70s can go back and be like, well, it's interesting.

[Craig]

I feel like it's a. It's depiction of Hollywood certainly would, would maybe speak even more. There's a lot of this book that is like in the margins of what you're getting as a reader. And so I bet that there's stuff that's lost on me in terms of what it is communicating. But the fact the. What the author of that article calls out of like is just a bunch mostly hacks. There's just like, nobody in this book is presented as, like, being particularly successful at best. Her ex husband is like, he's gonna show a film at Con. You know, but anybody can do that. Like, for the most part, we should do that.

[Andrew]

We should.

[Craig]

We should make a film and show it at con, see what they should.

[Andrew]

Do it, get the gold, our film, lay it as it plays.

[Craig]

And yeah, so like, all of the dreams are innately hollowed out just by virtue of who is there to enact them and what they're doing with them. So, yeah, that will be interesting to talk about. And then the only other thing I have on the. Where the book comes from, you know, it's her second novel. There's a believer.net interview with her where she talks about, like, kind of being surprised that it was a success in the way that it was. And it being the novel that, like, gave her the. Oh, yeah, this is gonna be what you do. Like, confidence.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

Which is interesting because it's still. She'd been writing in magazines for over a decade, but this is like, you.

[Andrew]

Know, I mean, I've been writing or I've been writing articles for over a decade. I still don't know if. If you like, picked me up by the ankles, turned me upside down and shook me out until all the words fell out of my pockets. I don't know if a book would.

[Craig]

Yeah, fair.

[Andrew]

One of fell out. You know what I mean?

[Craig]

That's fair.

[Andrew]

They're different skill.

[Craig]

But she also has told a story that like, some. That a critical part of this novel is that a character, you know, takes their own life with sleeping pills. And it is apparently, according to legend or according to this Vanity Fair article I think I read, based on a story that she heard told at a party by another actress that Tamar Hodel had was, you know, trying to take her own life and then somebody saved her. But, like, it was this kind of dramatic, like a friend declining to stop another friend from. From this and then like laying next to them and then being woken up. And it is this kind of harrowing scene at the end of this book. And it is apparently based on something that Joan heard or somebody told her. So.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

But there isn't much else that I could find that was like, here's why I sat down to write this book.

[Andrew]

Yeah, right.

[Craig]

Well, so let's take a quick break, Andrew, and then we will. We'll just play it as it lays, I guess.

[Andrew]

Yeah, we can play it as it Lays Craig this podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. When it comes to your online presence, Craig, you don't have to play it as a lathe. You can get a top tiered first class all expenses paid website. A good solid gold rocking website.

[Craig]

Okay?

[Andrew]

Even if you don't know anything about HTML or any other anything. If you take it to Squarespace and it's like hey Squarespace, help me, help me please help me make a website for my brand or my online store or whatever it is that I want to make a website out of.

[Craig]

And I do want to make a website. Andrew so what. What are the things that Squarespace can offer me, the listener here.

[Andrew]

Here are just a few of the many things that Squarespace can offer to you and to anybody who goes to Squarespace. Cutting Edge Design Craig watch. Watch the watch those corners. With Squarespace collection of cutting edge design tools, anyone can build a bespoke online presence that perfectly fits their Squarespace offers a complete library of professionally designed and award winning website templates with options for every use and category. No matter where you start. Your website is flexible to what you need with intuitive drag and drop editing, beautiful styling options, unrivaled visual design effects and more ways to list what you offer. No experience required. You can also get money, fundraise directly on your website and grow your impact with built in donation tools. Create a professional on brand website that makes it easy to accept one time or recurring contributions and engage support. With built in email campaigns and marketing tools you can connect with your community and inspire more people to support your cause. Also www.bignews.com as I think I've made that joke before, Every Dream needs a domain. Squarespace Domains makes it easy to find the best name for your business at one fair all inclusive price. No hidden fees or add ons required. Every Squarespace domain comes with advanced privacy and security tools included to ensure your domain remains online and protected. Don't wait to claim your name. Invest in your dream domain today.

[Craig]

Just for everyone. I feel like I checked this before as well. BigNews.com does not go anywhere currently.

[Andrew]

No, but I think it does cost more than like the $12.

[Craig]

It doesn't go to a domain registry so somebody sparked there.

[Andrew]

All right. If any of this sounds good to you, go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you are ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com overdue to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com overdue to save ten percent off your first purchase of a website or a domain.

[Craig]

All right, Andrew Craig.

[Andrew]

Say. Say it as it lays. Okay, tell me about this book.

[Craig]

So this book is about a woman named Mariah Wyeth who is in her early 30s. She's an actress. Former. I know, right? Actress, former model in a collapsing marriage, a young daughter who is institutionalized for medical reasons. It's a little unclear what exactly this her daughter needs, but she and her husband don't necessarily agree on, like, the care that she's getting. She has some, I'll say, quote, unquote friends that she spends time with it mostly in that it's. It's kind of hard to tell who she actually likes. If she. If she is just, like, full misanthrope, does. Who does she care about? If anyone kind of. Kind of person at this point. And the book is, I think it's roughly a year. Ish. It's not totally explicit about that. It does start in the fall of the collapse of her marriage, a pregnancy that she terminates, and then the way her life spins out of control until the climactic end of the book.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

It has a couple of different, like, stylistic features that maybe we can lead with.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

As, like, grounding. And then you can kind of ask me questions on the way in from there.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Because what I have absorbed about it through, you know, I never read the plot sections of summaries of.

[Craig]

You don't want to get spoiled.

[Andrew]

Please, no, because I don't want to get spoiled because I want you to tell me about it. Yeah, I want to help you. This is. This is a test of what you learned from reading the book. But my understanding is that she. She is known for, like, a. If not like a terseness of language, like a directness and like, a brevity of language, and then also for, like, nihilism.

[Craig]

Yeah, sure.

[Andrew]

So those are two big things. But, yeah, when you said that thing about, like, I don't. I can't tell if she cares about anything. I don't know. Culture goes through, like, all of these rotating phases where sometimes caring about stuff is cool and sometimes it's not.

[Craig]

Well, I.

[Andrew]

And I just assume this is from a period where caring about stuff is lagoche.

[Craig]

Well, that. And also caring about stuff in this book might have, like, you know, say, helped her life not fall apart. I'm not sure, you know, she. It's a little chicken or the egg, I suppose. Is she nihilistic Mariah because her life is falling apart, or is her life falling apart because she's so, you know, nihilistic and unable to connect with anyone. You know, probably more the former, but we'll talk about that.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

The stylistic thing that I think is worth sharing, that the addition I read is also like, you got to talk about this up front, please. There's an intro by a guy named David Thomas who talks about. There are three opening chapters that none of them are too long, but they are all first person chapters from Mariah, Helene, Helen. It's Helen with an e at the end. So I'm inclined.

[Andrew]

I think Helene would be Helene's, who's.

[Craig]

Her friend, and then Carter, who is her ex husband.

[Andrew]

Is it all first person or is it just these first, like, few chapters?

[Craig]

I was gonna say it's just those first few chapters. And then the rest of the book is a very close third person. On Mariah. There's a quote from Didion that the Thomas intro shares. I wanted to make it all first person, but I wasn't good enough to maintain a first. There were tricks I didn't know. So I began playing with a close third person just to get something down by a close third, I mean, not an omniscient third, but a third. Very close to the mind of the character. Suddenly one night I realized that I had some first person and some third person and that I was going to have to go with both or just not write a book at all. I was scared. I really, like, I.

[Andrew]

While recognizing the utility of the close third person perspective to a writer.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

I can't help but imagine what that arrangement would be like if I were, like, following you around in real life, just, like, really close to you and just staring at you the whole time, like, unblinking.

[Craig]

I don't like it when the camera is too close, looking at what you're doing.

[Andrew]

Hey, I'm looking at what you're doing. I'm gonna tell everybody.

[Craig]

I don't like that, man. I don't like that narrator. No, thank you. I do have at least one or two examples of how the. The perspective works there. That thing you mentioned, she likes Hemingway. There's that anecdote she shared about being a kid and writing, like typing Hemingway as a way to learn how it works in a. Like, oh, I like this composer. I will, like, transcribe his sheet music, you know, or whatever.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Just like, I have never. I've never done this kind of thing before, but I could. I could buy it as a way to like, do a really super active form of. Of reading. Paying attention to structure and. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting.

[Craig]

A lot of her dialogue and the way that information is conveyed in a. Like, sometimes elliptical or sometimes you're not getting the. The version of it that you would expect. Reminds me of some short stories, some Hemingway short stories that I've read. One example is that in the scene where she gets the abortion, the doctor has who's, like, one of the only. You know, this is pre Roe, this book. So there's a lot of discussion of, like, how can you legally or illegally get one who is able to pay for one?

[Andrew]

Yeah. As a late 60s, early 70s thing, it's like, it's pre Roe, but it's also part of the, like, cultural conversation that helps result in that decision.

[Craig]

So.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Interesting.

[Craig]

Yeah. And so this, like, guy who. This doctor who's known for doing clean work, but he's, like, doing it in this shady room where there's newspapers all over the floor. You don't get a, like, close third person of her in pain, screaming, yelling, thinking about what is happening in her body. Instead, after a few paragraphs of her thoughts of, like, trying to block out other things, you're getting the doctor just talking to her as he's going through the procedure, and you get him saying, mariah, don't scream. There's people next door. Like, think about what this is doing for you. Because she's under local anesthetic, she's not knocked out. And it's just this interesting way that she delivers the reality of the scene through a voice that your main character is hearing, rather than giving you kind of maybe a more traditional narrative experience, like third person narrator who's going to be like, mariah was screaming in pain, as happened. You know, she's. She gives you a third person perspective that is really deep in the subjective experience of the character.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

So that. That's one stylistic thing. And. And that comes out of her being like, Well, I had this character who I was writing in first person. The Mariah opening section is the. Literally, like, the first sentence is something like, everybody wonders why Iago's evil. I don't think that's maybe a waste of time. Maybe we shouldn't think about why Iago's evil. Maybe we shouldn't think about why some snakes are poisonous and some snakes aren't when it doesn't make Darwinian sense. Like, and the David Thomas intro is like, this is one heck of a way to meet a character.

[Andrew]

Yeah. I was gonna ask, is there. Aside from that. Aside from there just being like a fire hose of weird thoughts that you get subjected to. Are there things in this opening section that make it clear to you why she didn't want to continue in that vein for the rest of the book, or are you? I don't know. It's a tough question to ask.

[Craig]

The answer I can get to easily is that these first three chapters all quote unquote, take place after the events of the book. So, Okay, I certainly didn't know that going in, but there are allusions across these three chapters to the one character, bz his death, which happens at the end of the book. A hospitalization of Maria that presumably has happened, and that's her voice in the first chapter. But then the rest of the book is leading up to it also to how the other characters feel about that, to her divorce. So at the. At the very least, even if I can't quite put a pin on why she was so stumped by how to move forward with this character this way, she does find a structural way to be like, well, I've gotten all the first person I can out of my system. I'm not going to hop between perspectives anymore. I'm not, you know, interested or feeling like I'm able to do that. Let me follow this lady around.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I could definitely see a structure where, like, you jump into the first person for, like, brief chapters that are interspersed throughout as you. As you find it useful. And I feel like we've read. Yeah, I feel like I've ever read a book that has done that.

[Craig]

And what the other thing talking about brief chapters is. This book is very vignette. I say that and I sound like I'm talking about, like, addressing. Referencing a famous Italian man. Like, oh, you know, oh, this is in the style of vignette. No, it's just vignettes.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Like, do you think that Vignette is going to get kicked off the Ferrari team this year or something?

[Craig]

The thing about the Ferrari team right now, Andrew, is that they're neither. Driver is Italian, there's a Monegasque, and there's a British guy.

[Andrew]

That's the thing is, like, I know enough about F1 to, like, make a joke that sort of, like, faints toward F1 knowledge. But I don't know any. I don't know anything specific about it. I just know F1 is huge right now. Well, I saw Sinners over the weekend and there was a trailer for some F1.

[Craig]

Yeah. The Brad Pitt F1. Yeah. F1 is very excited that that movie.

[Andrew]

Exists where there's, like, in the trailer, it's a little bit about how, like, Brad Pitt's character is old, but then somebody in the trailer is like, he's not that old, though.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

I don't know if that was, like, part of Brad Pitt's contract at this point in his career or what, but.

[Craig]

That'S sort of sports. But I bet also Brad Pitt made the movie F1.

[Andrew]

F1, baby.

[Craig]

Yeah. No, the. The. The parts. Speaking of F1 parts of this book go very fast because there are chapters that will literally be, like, six lines long. I don't know where that kind of comes from for her. It feels very cinematic. There's an early scene where Maria is invited to a party by her friend bz, who is gay and in a loveless marriage with Helene because his mother pays them to stay together to keep up appearances. BZ is a very tragic, sad figure.

[Andrew]

This book drops the F bomb a lot.

[Craig]

It does a lot.

[Andrew]

Homosexual characters as, like, the few excerpts of it that I read, I think in that LA Times piece that I quoted earlier was just like. Yeah, there's a lot of.

[Craig]

There's a lot of it. And BZ is like, the book cares about him, and it is obviously a tragedy that he doesn't make it through the end of the book, but I don't. Yeah. I don't quite know what to do with that much slur dropping. It doesn't.

[Andrew]

Yeah. I think, like, it's not one we're gonna repeat on the show. So I guess we just mentioned that it's in there and then kind of move on.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

1970. And even a sympathetic account is going.

[Craig]

To have language that also, Mariah is not a good person. So, like, there is. Sure. There's also the. Like, it's a close third person. It's always Mariah's voice.

[Andrew]

And we're. Is the fact that her perspective exists meant to read as an endorsement of that perspective?

[Craig]

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. All that kind of stuff. But there she's taken to a party with bz and there's, like, stuff happening at this party that is kind of gross where, like, maybe, you know, some of these sleaze bags are being, you know, match made with young actresses and things like that that they want to, you know, sleep with that night or whatever. And it's not a very long scene, and it ends with Mariah kind of not necessarily bawling or crying, but just sad about just not fitting in and feeling disconnected from everyone. And the next chapter is, like, eight lines long, and it's her and BZ maybe on the phone or talking to each Other over coffee. You haven't asked me how it went after we left Anita's. How did it go? Maria said, without interest. Everybody got what he came for. BZ said, don't you ever get tired of doing favors for people? There was a long silence. You don't know how tired. BZ said, that's the whole chapter. It's this interesting little. Like, the decompression and the. And the fallout of that scene don't happen within the chapter. It's its own little, like, narrative nugget thing.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

And it allows her to fade out on the image she wants of Mariah crying and upset and then fade in on this other little interaction that she doesn't need to spend any energy setting up or breaking down. Like, she's just like, I don't know, these people talked and here's what they said, and then I'm gonna move on. She does a. She does that a lot throughout the book. They pick up in speed towards the latter third or so. You start getting vignettes that are. A couple of them are in italics. And I believe those are meant to be, like, from the same timeline as the Mariah who wrote the first chapter, who's, like, been hospitalized in some sort of psychiatric evaluation facility and is commenting on the events of the book a little bit differently than some of these other passages that are just Mariah, like, in the narrative. And so, like, you get. You do get stuff that is in the first person. Again, Andrew, actually, you did ask about that, and I answered it incorrectly because you. Some of these.

[Andrew]

Look at that.

[Craig]

Sorry.

[Andrew]

Unreliable. You're giving me an unreliable first person perspective. Now. I'm gonna have to follow you around, looking at you really close to keep you honest from now on.

[Craig]

I think. Don't like this guy.

[Andrew]

My name is Craig and this is my. My close third person, Andrew.

[Craig]

When I was 10 years old, my father taught me to assess quite rapidly the shifting probabilities on a craps layout. I could trace a layout in my sleep. The field here and the pass line all around. Even money on big six or eight. Five for one on any seven. Always when I play back my father's voice, it is with a professional rasp. It goes as it lays. Don't do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game. It was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go, those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I Mean, Yeah. That's where snakes like to live.

[Craig]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she uses these little vignettes to do stuff like that where you get like a first person, two or three paragraph chapter and also to do the kind of little narrative sejura thing between other story beats. So, like, the. The reading experience of the book is really interesting. There's another thing she does with dialogue that I. I think it's in what we would call the conditional mood. Andrew. I don't know. It's a. It's not the subjunctive mood. It's not the pure moods.

[Andrew]

Sounds like the worst, like, two CD set that you could buy is condition. Conditional mood.

[Craig]

Conditional mood. She does this thing early in the book where Mariah is talking about. So Carter, her husband, they got married after she left New York City. She got involved with this sleazebag, Ivan Costello.

[Andrew]

Okay. And she's a real sleazebag kind of name.

[Craig]

Real sleazebag guy. She moves. She meets Carter, moves out west with Carter. Somewhere along the way, she has a fling with a guy named Les Goodwin. I think it's understood that Les Goodwin is the father of the. Of her pregnancy.

[Andrew]

Les Goodwin, also kind of a scumbaggy name.

[Craig]

Yeah. There's also, like, Freddy Chaikin, I think, and Larry Kulik. Just like a lot of just sleazy guy names.

[Andrew]

Just like, guys.

[Craig]

Just guys. Freddie Chaykin is like, probably the best of the guys who could be sleazy. Johnny Waters is an actor that she sleeps with.

[Andrew]

Johnny Waters.

[Craig]

He has bad vibes and then she steals his car in the morning and, like, drives to Vegas and gets arrested. But she. So her. And Carter, you know, he is a director. He's always directed movies out in the desert, it seems. I'm not quite sure what they're about.

[Andrew]

If there's one thing I learned from years and years and years of watching Star Trek, it is that shooting in the desert is cheap.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And easy to sell as the surface of an alien planet.

[Craig]

So he's out there making movies. He has made two movies with her. One was a. His second movie with her, which did, like, succeed at the box office. She is like a woman who has been assaulted by a motorcycle gang. Unclear. I don't really remember what the plot of the movie is, but she begrudgingly said it was a good movie and that it's kind of a minor commentary on what types of roles allow young women to break through. I think the first movie he made of her, which, like, is kind of an art house cult Classic of some of kind. He, like, just filmed her surreptitiously, like, living her life just with, like, a camera that he had.

[Andrew]

Sounds like a close third person perspective to me.

[Craig]

He called it, like, you just called it Mariah. And it's just like, her just, like, you know, in the house doing things, like sometimes at a rehearsal or something. It's very creepy.

[Andrew]

And that also sounds like the kind of wicked, boring thing that people in Hollywood would pretend was really smart.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So that everybody thought they were smart for thinking it was smart. Or maybe, I mean.

[Craig]

Yes. Or. Or like, she has this. Maybe in that movie she has some sort of ineffable quality that makes you want to watch her, but then you put her in a movie where she actually has to act and, like, it's not clicking. Like there's some sort of, like, weird thing the camera's doing and you can never really capture her. I don't know. Whatever. Maybe that's why she doesn't succeed as an actor. But, like, the Carter and BZ will like, put this movie on all the time. Like, it's like, screen it for people because it's this art house thing and she hates it. It's a nightmare. But so her marriage with Carter is falling apart. He's still successful. He's, like, sleeping with other women and she slept with other men. And she is spending the beginning of the book just driving. She just drives everywhere. She just likes to get out on the highway and drive.

[Andrew]

It's very la.

[Craig]

Very la.

[Andrew]

They love roads out there and they hate mass transit.

[Craig]

And at one point she realizes that she could. Like, she's not far from where he's making a movie, and she thinks about what would happen if she called him. And like, very effortlessly, the. The style of the writing slides into the conditional mood where she is saying, or the narrator is saying, well, she could call him and she could go see him, and he would say, well, maybe you could just come up here. Get up here real quick. And then she instead realizes, no, this would happen. He would say something and she would say something, and before either of them knew it, they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion. Oh, Christ, he would say, I felt good today. Really good. For a change. You fixed that. You really pricked the balloon. How did I fix that? You know how. I don't know how. She would wait for him to answer, but he would say nothing, then would just sit with his head in his hands, she would feel first guilty, resigned to misery, then furious, trapped, white with anger. Listen to me, she would say, then almost shouting, trying to take him by the shoulders and shake him out of what she could not see as other than an elaborate pose. He would knock her away and the look on his face, contorted, teeth bared, would render her paralyzed. Why don't you just get it over with? He would say, leaning close, his face still contorted. Why don't you just go in that bathroom and take every pill in it? Why don't you die? Just a.

[Andrew]

That's a conditional mood. I don't, I don't like.

[Craig]

I don't like this condition. I don't like this mood.

[Andrew]

No, thanks.

[Craig]

It is a, A like trick of tense that she uses a few times for their relationship in particular, that allows her to like, not have to come up with dramatic scenes in which these types of arguments would happen, but instead gives you access to Mariah's understanding of their relationship as it exists. Like, sure, she doesn't have to.

[Andrew]

And also you can just, you can play out the scene and then you can be done playing it out when you want to be done playing it out instead of having to follow it through to every, like, possible conclusion or consequence.

[Craig]

And yes, exactly. The scene doesn't have to have, like, plot to it for it to be interesting and to tell you about the characters. And because it is kind of a supposed interaction, that's what she's able to get away with. It was something that struck me early and then it happens a few times in the book and I was like, wow, I'm sure I've ever read books that do this kind of thing, but the particular voice of this book, it like really worked for me.

[Andrew]

Yeah, sure.

[Craig]

So like the plot of the book, I've covered a few beats of it already. There's this like, you know, they're not in a good way. The opening, when she's driving, is described as the. The first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter. The summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills, a bad season in the city. Mariah put 7,000 miles on the Corvette and Tesla miles. She has described Andrew as being able to eat a hard boiled egg while driving. Like she can crack it on, like.

[Andrew]

You can feel it.

[Craig]

Yeah, she cracks the heel on the steering wheel.

[Andrew]

I can't peel a hard boiled egg like in my kitchen. I'm bad at it.

[Craig]

Pretty intense.

[Andrew]

I hate it actually.

[Craig]

But yeah, also like what? Like why?

[Andrew]

Okay, I guess. Yeah, it's like 1970, and they hadn't invented, like, most of the good food road foods yet. Well, you can't. You can't eat gorp. You can't eat some gorp in your car. You gotta crack an egg on the steering wheel.

[Craig]

Crack an egg on the steering wheel. It's true.

[Andrew]

You have. Yeah, you got my gorp.

[Craig]

But about gorp, I don't know. I don't.

[Andrew]

You don't know about gorp?

[Craig]

What is gorp?

[Andrew]

I'm glad I called you on it. It's called Good Old Raisins and Peanuts is what it stands for. It's just trail mix.

[Craig]

Okay, Now I'm wondering, astute listeners of our podcast have to write in and tell us if Andrew has ever explained gorp to me before. Because the second I heard the acronym, I, I, I heard another time of you telling me what gorp was.

[Andrew]

Maybe, Maybe it was one of the times I was following you around and sticking my face in your face.

[Craig]

Wow. We've really zeroed in on this interaction. Sticking raisins in my ears, but yeah. So the plot of the book is that her life is falling apart. We get introduced to the characters, most of whom I've mentioned already. She is kind of struggling to break back into work. She stormed off a set recently, which has given her agent pause as to booking her for more work. What are you learning about gorp? Real quick? I can.

[Andrew]

No, I just. I was just. I was just. No, I was just looking it up just to make sure that I wasn't misrepresenting what it was. Yeah, the Wikipedia pages. Trail mix.

[Craig]

Yeah, sure. Okay.

[Andrew]

Gorp and Scroggin redirect to this Wikipedia page. What is, what is scrogging?

[Craig]

It's one of the Urukai, I think. You can't call somebody scroggin.

[Andrew]

New Zealand trail mix is known as scroggin or smoggle. That is made up.

[Craig]

Yeah, that's.

[Andrew]

In Australia, the term scroggin is used almost exclusively. Although in more recent years, trail mix has been imported into the jargon from the US because trail mix is not like smuggle. I could say trail mix to another human being. I don't want to say schmagel.

[Craig]

Schmoggle was Final Fantasy Creature.

[Andrew]

Am I?

[Craig]

Yeah. Gorp is his, you know, one ring name. Come on.

[Andrew]

Yeah, this is, this is my. This is my hobbit Smoggle. And this is Gorp, the little lizard that, like, lives on his shoulder.

[Craig]

Why do we start Naming snacks after our Tolkien ocs, like, how did this happen? But so, okay, she's really struggling and she realizes that. That she is pregnant. It kind of comes to a head where she was. She tells Carter this, and he is really. I don't think Carter is a good guy. I do think the book doesn't sound.

[Andrew]

Like a lot of the dudes in this book are.

[Craig]

No, they're all.

[Andrew]

They're all bad guys.

[Craig]

I do think the book does an interesting job of, like, giving you scenes where it's clear that Mariah, like, made some bad decisions and is either not straightforward with people and you can, like, zoom out on the book, I think, and maybe you're supposed to and see the ways in which that is, like, it's a reflection of society, oppressing women or other forms of repression that are happening. And this is the product of somebody who lives in these systems. Like, the other thing about Mariah, her parents are both dead. Her mom may or may not have taken her own life in a car accident. The town that she is from is this, like, village that no longer exists that I think her dad won in a craps game or something. And then now it's part of a nuclear testing zone. Like, she's just completely unmoored from roots of any kind, and then is now, you know, thrust into this terrible exploitative industry. But she is. Like, when Carter's like, what were you going to tell me about any of this? Like, how is this supposed to work? How did you pick this doctor that gave you a weird test that now you know that you're pregnant? And she's like, I. His doctor's office was next to Saks. I was at Saks getting my hair done. Like, you know, and it's. That's one of those things where I'm sure I could read that, read this book again and be like, that's her just, you know, lying or whatever, because she's pissed at Carter. Like, there's. Or you read it truthfully and it's like an indictment of her, you know, whatever. But he. Carter does, you know, convinces her to have an abortion. It's unclear if she actually, like, even to her. To herself, whether or not she wants it, though. Carter threatens to, like, pursue full custody of their daughter if she does not go through with getting an abortion, which is pretty close.

[Andrew]

And maybe, you know, maybe it's just. It is easier to imagine a future where your life is as it is currently rather than, like, imagining a future with a genre.

[Craig]

And she's not satisfied with her Current relationship to her daughter because her daughter's in a treatment facility that she thinks her daughter should not be in.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

And the couple snippets of a. Like what should my life be we get access to. Are Mariah envisioning like her in like a cabin somewhere living with her daughter Kate. And they're like canning. They're canning foods. Like, she wants this.

[Andrew]

That's what you do. That's what you do in a cabin.

[Craig]

It's the simplest life that she could possibly have.

[Andrew]

And so either canning or you are dividing up people's meat that you made out of them.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

So that nobody has to eat their family.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

So as in the Donner Party. I did read a lot about the Donner Party that did not end up being relevant to this episode.

[Craig]

I do. Yeah. I do think that maybe Mariah's like visions of what her life could be would have been different if Gideon were descended from the Donner Party people. But that would be kind of difficult. She's not to be descended from them, actually.

[Andrew]

I mean, there really. Craig, like more than half of the people. The people survived, but there are a lot of survivors.

[Craig]

I don't like to think about that. I don't like to think about the party at all. That's a bad party.

[Andrew]

It's not a good party. I mean. And you were at that party where I put on Seinfeld scene. It and it totally killed the vibe. That was a better party though, than the Donner party. Probably.

[Craig]

My now wife was at that party. I think she survived.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I think that was a. That was a big. That was a test that I engineered to make sure she was good enough.

[Craig]

For you dating even like six months. My God. You didn't run that by me either. You just put in the disc.

[Andrew]

I just thought it would be fun. People like seeing it. People like Seinfeld. Seen it is. Remember the era of anymore. Seen it is. It's like those like VHS tape games that. That people would play. Yeah, it's that. It's that tied to a dead form of physical media.

[Craig]

Everybody was playing. Seen it anyway. The. The played as a lazy baby into the darkness of this book. She does get the abortion. It really unravels her mental state. She's having terrible dreams and, you know, not quite hallucinations, but just like feeling pretty terrible about her existence in the world. And so she spirals out of control. Lots of risk, risky behavior. Some, you know, drug making, drug taking. Not drug making behavior. Drug taking behavior. Hooking up with people like Ivan Costello. Again, like Larry Kulik calling up Les Goodwin and demanding that he come out to California and trying to shack up with him in a motel to make herself feel better. And neither of them can really connect, and they both feel terrible about it. Along the way, she also gets, you know, formally divorced from Carter, which is terrible, and, you know, leaves her further unmoored. And the final, like, sequence before the end of the book is, like, she has gone out to be on a film shoot with Carter and everybody in the desert because, like, what else is she gonna do? And there's this, like, what the lead actress has. Somebody has, like, beaten her up to the point where they're like. This shoot is running long because they're, like, waiting for bruises to subside. And it's either Carter or the lead actor or it's somebody else. And Carter's sleeping with Helene, and just everything is pretty terrible. And bz, her and BZ are spending time together, and they've connected a few times over the course of the book. Both of them kind of being like, this is pretty terrible, huh? This whole, you know, world that we live in. And BZ's had enough, and she does not stop him from, you know, taking a lot of sleeping pills. They lay down in a bed, you know, next to each other, him, you know, her holding his hand. And then she is awoken by Helene and Carter being like, what the heck is going on?

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

And then the last chapter is one of those italics chapters of her in the facility now, which is also in a previous chapter. Been like, they all say I'm in here because I'm crazy. They are ruling. They are ruling out the possibility that I kind of want to be in here because who else? I don't want to be connected to anybody. So I've chosen to be here, in a way, is what she is saying about herself. She says one thing in my defense, not that it matters. I know something Carter never knew, or Helene or maybe you. I know what quote, unquote, nothing means and keep on playing. Why BZ would say, why not? I say. And the fact that they both know what nothing means is part of their. Her conversation with BZ before he makes the decision that he makes. And she is somehow soldiering on in a way, though not out in the world. So what are we supposed to think about that? I don't know. Yeah, it's a. It's pretty bleak.

[Andrew]

Yeah, it sounds pretty bleak, dude. Well, if I don't want to play it as it lays, what if I want it to lay better? Yeah.

[Craig]

When she describes the plate as it lays for phenomenon early in the book, she cops to not to, to like, I don't think this way anymore. But as she learned it, it's the like kind of gambler's fallacy of, well, if you gamble again, it could work out better. That that is true.

[Andrew]

It could. It could do that.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

And famously, the more that you play, the, the higher your chance you're doing.

[Craig]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there is that kind of way of thinking that she, I think, believes is what brought her to this point. And maybe she doesn't think that way anymore. There is like one last thing I will call out in terms of like, stuff about the writing that I liked and might be indicative of Didion's other writing. Perhaps there's a scene after the divorce when Mariah is just like basically refusing to ever leave the house or she's by herself and is not interacting with anybody else and she goes to the grocery store and she is like commenting on the other women that she knows are single based on their behavior in the grocery store. I'll just like read this and I think I'll share this because I, I imagine there are essays she's written that have this level of like, like percept. This version of perception in them.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

She had watched them in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At 7 o' clock on a Saturday evening, they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper's Bazaar. And in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth. But there they were. One lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Mariah shopped always for a household. Gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chili salsa, dried lentils, Alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams. 20 pound boxes of laundry detergent. She's doing Supermarket Sweep. She knew. She knew all the indices. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely. Never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Mariah ate cottage cheese. Just really, just good, good old writing here, I think.

[Andrew]

Good old writing.

[Craig]

Good old writing.

[Andrew]

Like some peanuts.

[Craig]

Some like galp, some interesting like, takes on single womanhood, on. From someone. From a character who doesn't want to be perceived that way. Kind of this, like, really reductive vision of women moving about the world from a woman who doesn't want to be reduced. Like that, I think, is what works about the book for me as we wrap up. Andrew, I know you had a piece that you had found that was, like, maybe a little more critical.

[Andrew]

Yeah, just. Just the. The review from the New York Times in the 1970s. This is talking about what Didion has said about her own writing. This says in the preface to her essays, she says, that she has sometimes been paralyzed by the conviction that writing is an irrelevant act. Her new book feels as if it were written out of an insufficient impulse by a writer who doesn't know what else to do with. With all that talent and skill. And then this is jumping all the way down to the bottom. It is a very good talent. There is a high intelligence in her observations and her connection. She uses the language with the ease, control, and virtuosity that comes from natural grace and hard work. To use another metaphor, her prose tends to posture like a figure from a decadent period of art whose fingers curl toward an exposed heart or draped bosom, swelling with suspect emotion. In our day, the finger points straight, groin word. But it isn't the direction that matters. It is the insistence that makes us suspect Joan Didion's own lack of faith in what she is writing and puts her book in that heartbreaking category. A bad novel by a very good writer.

[Craig]

Oh, wow.

[Andrew]

Yeah. So, like, very hesitantly and tentatively negative, I think. I guess, and probably. Probably responding to what you are reporting as, like, the vignette nature of it, the nihilistic nature of it.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And I just, like, the. Like, a bunch of stuff just happened.

[Craig]

I was. There were certainly parts of my read where I was just kind of like. And it's building to what? And I'm. I'm always wary of my reaction to that, especially when it is like, a novel centered on a woman who is, like, experiencing things that could never happen to me and, like, the way that I would have to respond to them.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And at a certain point, I think you have to be like, well, well, if it doesn't seem like it has a point, then, like, probably the point is, like, what it is captured. Like, what is it capturing and showing to me, like, what is it? What is it preserving for the future?

[Craig]

And it is okay if that doesn't work for you as a reader, like, not to just. I'M not, like, being like, well, that New York Times review was wrong. It's.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Especially when it's a review from someone being like, this person has written a bunch of great stuff, and I want to see them, like, really crack something open, you know?

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Is just, to me, interesting to read her first, like, you know, pretty successful novel and obviously interested in the Hollywood. It's just so just everybody's just sad here. Everyone's just exploiting each other and just.

[Andrew]

I've seen BoJack Horseman. I know about Hollywood.

[Craig]

I watched. Yeah. The recent text.

[Andrew]

For me, that's, like, one of the three shows that I keep hoping that you will watch.

[Craig]

I know.

[Andrew]

Talk about it.

[Craig]

I know. And meanwhile, I'm gonna be here and tell you that, like, this book made me think of Mulholland Drive a lot, which is a movie I watched for the first time, like, three months ago. So. But that is also, if you live.

[Andrew]

For, like, another 40 years, eventually I'll.

[Craig]

Probably get to BoJack. I'll probably make it just in time for whatever the, like, Legacy will. BoJack pony dude is, you know, in, like, boy, I don't know.

[Andrew]

I don't know if we can do that.

[Craig]

But, you know, I'll watch the original just in time for that. Don't worry about me.

[Andrew]

Just in time for BoJack Colon Origins or whatever.

[Craig]

Yeah. But. So that's. I guess that's the word on Joan Didion. This book, I think, is interesting. It's not a long read. It is at times a very tough read, but the quality of writing is, in my opinion, unassailable. It's interesting, well written stuff.

[Andrew]

Yes. I think that is what the New York Times review kind of agrees on, is, like, the writing in here is very good. Maybe you find something to value in, like, the larger, you know, the bigger picture, and maybe you don't, but you can't deny that it is a talented mind that is putting all these words together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Craig]

So that word. We did it. We played it as it laid.

[Andrew]

We played it as it laid.

[Craig]

Yeah. If you, the listener, can remember whether or not Andrew has ever told me about gorp before, send us an email.

[Andrew]

Somebody's got. Somebody's got it.

[Craig]

Overdupodmail.com find us on social media. Send us images of your favorite gorp overdue pod. We're on bluesky and Instagram. Use Instagram to its full potential. Why else are we there? Send us Gorp pictures of Gorp. Thanks to Nick Laurensis, who composed our theme music. Don't know if he's ever eaten Gorp? I'm sure he has. Does he know about Gorp? We'll find out.

[Andrew]

How will we find out? Are you gonna text him?

[Craig]

I could.

[Andrew]

Hey, what's okay if you do that?

[Craig]

He's eating. Gilbert Gorp, you know.

[Andrew]

My God, Andrew.

[Craig]

Folks want to know more about the show. Where do they go?

[Andrew]

Overdue Podcast.com is our Internet website. Up there we have links to the books that we have read and the ones that we are going to read next week. I'm reading Cursed Bread by Sophie Macintosh. Normally I'm more of a Sophie PC kind of a guy, but I guess Sophie Macintosh will do. For our podcast, we also have a Patreon project. Patreon.com overduepod Support the show directly. Get access to our Discord server. Pay for our equipment, our books, our hosting, all the stuff that we need to make the show keep spinning and for us to keep doing episodes like this one or the last one or whatever one that you like the most. Patreon.com overduepod and as we have announced a couple of times, our current long read project, Sit Me Baby One More Time, will soon be giving way to our next one, which is called the Sillymarillion. It's about J.R.R. tolkien's the Silmarillion. Yeah. And much like the book Wicked that we read a while back, it is a. Is a book that many people have encountered and said, huh. So I can't wait. I can't wait to. I can't wait to unpack that for everybody. You got anything else?

[Craig]

No, just thanks everybody for listening. Thanks for helping us. Play it as it lays in 2025.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Everybody play it as it lays. Man, if we were going to change our catchphrase at this late date, pretty good one. Play it as it LA is not bad. Everybody play it as it lays and try to be happy. That was a headgum podcast.

[Craig]

McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's. Tender juicy and its own sauce. Would you look at that? Well, you can't see it, but trust me, it looks delicious. New McCrispy strips now at McDonald's.