One way to read Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays

Not that there isn't a plot in Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays (1970) - there is at least the ghost of a plot, as we follow the sad protagonist, Mariah, through her depression, breakup of marriage to director Carter (who is surprisingly finding some success w/ his latest film, leaving Mariah more depressed about her failing acting career), and in what seems to be the fulcrum of the story as Mariah, acquiescing to Carter's demand, pursues and gets an abortion (the child may not be Carter's) in one of the most harrowing and disturbing depictions of backstreet abortions in the days when legal abortion was available pretty much nowhere (and is this where we're heading? so-called right-to-life elected officials should be required to read these chapters before mouthing off) - but plot aside, which is somewhat difficult to follow because of JD's propensity to dropping in names of peripheral characters without fully establishing them in our minds, it strikes me that you could read many, probably most of the 80+ extremely short chapters (none more than 2 pp. some just a paragraph) as short stories, or even prose poems, in their own right. Standing these chapters alone, the best of them seem to be early precursors of the abbreviated style of an Eisenberg or, their closest kin, Lydia Davis; for those curious take a look at the chapter on pp. 101-2 in the FSG Classics edition, in which Mariah is sitting at a counter in a restaurant waiting for one of the pay phones to become available (remember pay phones!) an the woman next to her, obviously disturbed, pesters M with odd comments, e.g., "Why are you ignoring me?" M, also listening to a woman on the pay phone calling a cab (has she been abandoned, along w/ her child?), at last offers a few words of solace to the disturbed woman who comes back with some violent invective, something like "Get your hands off of me, whore!" Read this chapter and you'll see what I mean: This is a novel that comprises dozens of gems, stories and epiphanies in miniature, like clothes hanging on a line (remember these?), that make of a composite picture of a woman on the verge of a breakdown, set against the peculiar mores and mannerisms of LA in the 1960s.