Celebrity and Disconnection in Joan Didion’s Hollywood Writings

In her 1979 non-fiction essay “The White Album,” Californian writer Joan Didion (1934-2021) describes her living on Franklin Avenue and the peculiar atmosphere in Beverly Hills during the summer of 1969. The infamous murders on Cielo Drive put an abrupt end to the hedonistic existence of Hollywood celebrities and “music people.” What Didion describes as an era of “paranoia” and “vortical tension” finds echo in her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays. Indeed, actress Maria Wyeth feels estranged in a life where vacuity and “nothingness” prevail. Going beyond the Hollywood novel tradition, Play It As It Lays not only focuses on the cinema industry, but the narrative also displays cinematic techniques and follows a film structure to convey the influence of media on Maria’s reality, that consequently accentuates her feeling of disconnection. This paper aims to analyze how Joan Didion’s own experience in the Hollywood milieu has permeated the narrative texture of her novel Play It As It Lays, especially in the portrayal of an alienating celebrity culture and the use of cinematic writing.