Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion tells the story of Maria. She is beautiful. She is a former model. She has had a moderately successful acting career. She is the wife of a successful movie director. She is sinking into depression.

Her situation is driven by an unhappy marriage, a series of meaningless sexual encounters, an abortion, an addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs, and an institutionalized daughter.

In a stream-of-consciousness narrative - told in the present and in flashbacks - Didion takes us inside Maria's head as she stumbles through months of self-destructive behavior.

Maria has no direction in her life; her nihilism is symbolized by her habit of hopping into an expensive car and speeding through the highways of Los Angeles. She is surrounded by the decadence and opulence of the 1960s Hollywood inner circle, but she is disconnected from it.

It's an emotional ride. I started reading in the evening and stayed up half the night to finish it.