Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion [Online Meeting]

This event is supported by The Royal Institute of Philosophy’s Local Partners Programme.

N.B.: this meeting will be held online via Google Meet There is also an in-person session being held on Wednesday in the Prince of Wales pub near Covent Garden.

Continuing our thematic year of 'Crisis of Values', Play It As It Lays takes us to Hollywood in the 1960s with the celebrated writer and essayist, Joan Didion.

Glamour, gameplaying and nihilism in a heady and heavy portrayal of LA through the eyes of Maria after her probable mental break. Expect a cast of unpleasant characters and difficult themes told in clean prose, and possibly to confront the meaning of life (if there is any).

The meeting starts at 7pm with drink breaks at 8 and 9. The discussion will end around 10pm but leave whenever you need to.

Here's the blurb from GoodReads:

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.