In the canon
Play It As It Lays
- Form
- Form Novel
- Year
- Year 1970
- Pages
- Pages 220
Maria Wyeth drives the freeways of Los Angeles for hours, timing her entrances and exits, watching the white line unspool ahead of her, and for the length of the drive she does not have to feel anything at all. Joan Didion built an entire novel out of that discipline of not-feeling: short chapters, some no longer than a paragraph, cut so close to the bone the white space between them does half the telling.
I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
The blurb, the gist, the why of the day and the work itself are in the app. The first button needs it on this device; the second gets it there.