“Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not anymore.”
Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays, 1970
Maria is a mother. A sex object. Washed up. Married. Surrounded. Alone. Pregnant. An actress married to a self-proclaimed auteur, playing the game of reputation and influence that fuels Hollywood.
Reality is something neither she nor anyone around her can face. She floats — drinks, acquiesces to indignities, gets arrested, disappears into the desert for weeks. She circumnavigates Los Angeles for hours on the freeway, subsisting on Coca-Cola, cigarettes, and pills.
This section captures how she pantomimes the trappings of propriety and glamour while disintegrating:
…
“So that she would not have to stop for food she kept a hard-boiled egg on the passenger seat of the Corvette.
She could shell and eat a hard-boiled egg at seventy miles an hour (crack it on the steering wheel, never mind salt, salt bloats, no matter what happened she remembered her body) and she drank Coca-Cola in Union 76 stations, Standard stations, Flying A’s.”
…
Maybe it’s Didion’s incredible prose or the acerbic authenticity she gives Maria which drew me to this book. Maybe it’s that Maria is a kindred spirit, having to escape a claustrophobic, insular world by opting out of answers. In how she finally accepts that snakes are snakes; some are toxic and the rest are liars.
Think-pieces describe Maria as a failed, tragic character. They read her wishes near the end of the book — to live simply, to preserve apricots, to be a mother to her daughter — as hopeless dreaming.
I see these as what’s left after she cuts out everything superfluous.
It’s not nihilism to excise everything except for what you really want.