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Samantha Bernal

Jennifer Rodrick

English 115

20 November 2019

What causes a person to change?

The novel, Play It as It Lays, was written by Joan Didion, who was born in 1934 in

Sacramento, California. Joan Didion is a successful novelist best known for writing novels that

require deep-thinking and focus on psychological disorders. The novel Play It as It Lays is one

of her masterpieces and it is about Maria Wyeth, a woman who has a mental disorder, separated

with her husband, has a four-year-old daughter, lost a child, and a career that is slowly fading

away. Most of the scenes in the story are places that are familiar to the residents of Los Angeles

because the novel focuses on the city itself, the culture, and its residents. The novel focuses on

the main character, which is Maria, but there’s a lot of characters that are mentioned in the book

and each of them contributes on how Maria acts the way she does and how twisted her life gets

as each of these characters unfolds and plays the role they have. Maria Wyeth is described in the

novel as a thirty-one-year-old divorced lady with a slowly sinking career that has no enthusiasm

interacting with people, prefers being alone, and is lacking of motivation. These were caused by

the events that happened in her past and the way she is treated by the people that surround her,

and this also changed her way of thinking by the end of the novel.

People face different challenges every day, some have heavier hardships than others and

they tend to forget their worth and importance. Kathleen Smith is an author and a licensed

professional counselor who wrote an article called Schizotypal Personality Disorder that talks

about the definition of this mental disorder and it also mentions some of the symptoms and
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causes. Kathleen Smith says, “they might take magical thinking, superstitions, or paranoid

thoughts very seriously, avoiding people whom they irrationally mistrust.” Meaning that people

with Schizotypal Personality Disorder tend to avoid people who used to be part of their lives.

This implies to Maria because in the book, she avoids most of the people who want to help her

with her condition but there was one person whom she didn’t want to talk to or interact with and

that person was Ivan Costello. Ivan Costello was Maria’s first boyfriend who depended on

Maria’s earning to live by and wanted Maria to provide for him because he doesn’t have

anything and he also doesn’t have a job. After Maria discovered her parents’ death, she started to

act differently and that was when Ivan Costello left her. There was a part in the story when Ivan

came to Maria’s house without a word and was asked what he wanted from her and Ivan said that

he just came to make her remember about something that happened in the past. Ivan says, “You

used to tell me you’d do it for me until you died. You used to tell me—” Then Maria says, “I

used to tell you a lot of things.” (Didion 181) Ivan wanted Maria to remember how they used to

be in the past and Maria said she couldn’t remember because she wants to forget the bad deeds

he has done to her. Maria avoided Ivan due to the fact that she doesn’t want to remember the

time when Ivan took advantage of her and the bad memories that happened in her past. This

made her feel traumatized and thinks that it might happen again to her.

People with mental disorder need a lot of attention and support from their family and

loved ones in order to overcome their worries, doubts, fears, and challenges. A story of a

person’s experience with mental disorder was published on a website called NAMI, which is a

website that informs and gives awareness to people about mental illness. It provides information

that people should know about mental disorders and includes stories based on real life

experiences of those who were affected by psychological fragmentations. This story specifically
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talks about a person’s experiences, how she felt and the thought that came to her mind while she

was experiencing depression. There’s no positivity that you could bring out of this because even

if they try to fight it, they are still driven by the negative thoughts and the voices that only them

can hear. The writer of this article says, “You can’t handle the darkness that’s pulling you into an

eternal abyss and you decide that only way to stop the darkness is to join it. You take your own

life. Suicide. Simple as that.” This means that the sadness, emptiness, and fear that people with

mental disorder feel deep inside force them to take their own life. This is related to the story of

Maria because there was a part when Maria was going through the process of thinking about

having an abortion and when she finally did the abortion. In the book, it says, “I said don’t make

any noise, Maria, now I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, you’ll bleed a day or so, not heavily,

just spotting, and then a month, six weeks from now you’ll have a normal period, not this month,

this month you just had it, it’s in the pail.” (Didion 83) This describes the scene when Maria

decided to have an abortion. Then she started having nightmares about the abortion and the book

also mentions, “because she had known all along what would be found in the pipes, what hacked

pieces of human flesh.” (Didion 97) This is when Maria started to see things that only she can

see due to the fact that she was forced to have an abortion and the sadness she felt after losing

her baby. The abortion was the turning point when Maria started to lose her mind and started to

see everything related to her lost child.

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Every child needs a mother or a father to guide and support them and make them feel that

they are loved. Based on the book, Maria was greatly affected by the death of her parents and it

was also the time when she started to act strangely when interacting with other people. The

picture above was titled, “Mother consoling her sad daughter,” which is clearly depicted in the

picture because you can see the mother with her hands on her daughter’s shoulder. It mentions in

the book when Maria was looking for her mother and it says, “She wanted to see her mother. She

wanted to go back to the last day she had spent with her mother: a Sunday.” (Didion 86) This

was mentioned in the book a few days after Maria had an abortion. Maria was looking for

someone in her past and was very close to her heart. She wanted to see her deceased mother

because she wanted a mother to console her, to give her comfort, and make her feel loved as she

was going through a tough phase in her life.

Maria Wyeth was a slightly strange woman whom I believe has a Schizotypal

Personality Disorder caused by the death of her parents, the boys that she was sexually involved

and didn’t treat her right, and the abortion. These are the main reasons why Maria acted strangely

with other people because she was not only traumatized by the death of her parents but also

consistently asked to have an abortion by her ex-husband. She didn’t find the love and care she

was longing for with the boys that came into her life. Maria was slowly drowning into the

darkness and sadness when she had an abortion because it wasn’t her own will to take the life of

her own child. She became devastated and has shown signs that she wanted to just give up but by

the end of the novel, she came to realize that life has no meaning, although BZ had stopped

“playing the game” of having a healthy and good lifestyle by taking his own life, Maria decided

to continue living for her daughter, Kate.

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Works Cited

Didion, Joan. Play It as It Lays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.

“Mother Consoling Her Sad Daughter.” Freepik, 9 Oct. 2019, www.freepik.com/free-

photo/mother-consoling-her-sad-daughter_2826738.htm. Accessed 19 November 2019

Smith, Kathleen. “Schizotypal Personality Disorder.” Psycom.net - Mental Health Treatment

Resource Since 1986, 13 Nov. 2018, www.psycom.net/schizotypal-personality-disorder.

Accessed 16 November 2019

“So Dark & Deep: A Story of Mental Illness.” NAMI, 11 Oct. 2018, www.nami.org/personal-

stories/so-dark-deep-a-story-of-mental-illness. Accessed 16 November 2019