warrenschierling

A beautiful book that you can finish in one sitting. However, don't read this when you are depressed because it can make you more depressed. In fact, it made me stop reading for a while because I felt so sad because I could not shake off from my mind the disheartening scenes in the book. This book that is included in the Time Magazine's 100 Best English Novels from 1923 to 2005. The book is about a 30-year old mother, Maria Wyeth who lives in the 60's America as a struggling actress. She meets all sorts of men - straight and bisexual - and makes love with them. Like how Capote pictured showbusiness in that era, the characters in this book seem to be living in another planet or maybe the plain-looking me is not born to be aware of how that world operates. Aside from sleeping around, they love to use drugs, drink booze, live "empty" lives, believe in nothing including themselves and see nothing in or dream nothing good about their future. So, Maria gets pregnant and even when she is already a mother, she still lives an empty life. She seems to abhor it and at several points, you can see that she struggles to set her life straight but she seems to have been engulfed by the world that she lives in. Aside from the beautiful lyrical prose of Didion, I think that inner struggle in Maria is what makes the story worth reading if not once but twice. The ennui and the meaningless of the showbiz life in America in the 60's have been more adequately captured by Capote in his memoirs and probably shown by the movie Boogie Nights. However, the state of the depression and the inner struggle of the female protagonist is simply captivating. Janice Galloway did it in The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (4 stars) was able to do in 236 pages of a standard-sized trade paperback but Joan Didion only did in 168 in a small thin paperback. If you are fascinated with Hollywood in the 1960's and you want to know how women think at the edge of a bigtime depression, go for this book. Opps, if you want to know how good a writer Didion is, that should be the bigger reason to pick this book up and read when you are not sad and if you want to be a bit sad.

2020-08-24 05:26