The members of Becky’s Book Club in Pacific Palisades couldn’t stand “Play It as It Lays.” Snakes, freeways, difficult men and Didion’s quiet brutality hang in the air like the oppressive heat of this unusually warm spring day. At their feet, a regal Airedale terrier named Phoebe lounges, looking as though she belongs in an oil painting.

“If I had read this book before coming to Los Angeles, I would have never come,” says Raymee Olin Weiman, one of the members of the book club. She’s a spirited talker who eventually concedes a compliment to Didion. “I did not like it, but I was compelled to read it, because the writing is so brilliant.”

Becky Nedelman, an 85-year-old who organizes the book club, agrees. “To me, Maria is when you drive by an accident, and you don’t want to look, but you do,” she says of Didion’s aimless and troubled protagonist.

Amy Silverberg, the book club facilitator (who is also a Times contributor and friend of this reporter) had warned the group the month prior that they might shudder at the unnerving novel. When she walked in the door, they confirmed Silverberg’s fears, immediately airing their displeasure. “You are to blame,” she tells them with a smile. “I want to reiterate that.”

For all their grievances with Didion’s fiction, the women’s lives bear a striking resemblance to Didion’s own. Some of the women in the book club are older than the late author Joan Didion, who would have been 91. A few of them are in their 90s, save for Gail Heltzer — “the baby of the group,” as she’s called — who is 83.

The book club comprises old friends who have been meeting to discuss literature for over 25 years. Long-standing book clubs in Los Angeles are a rarity — many flame out due to dwindling interest, scheduling conflicts and waning enthusiasm. That hasn’t been the case for Becky’s Book Club, which still sparks lively debate at every meeting.

The gathering, which takes place in the women’s homes, has endured through each phase of their lives — marriages, motherhood, even illness.

“The only way we’ve lost members, unfortunately, has been by passing away or moving away,” says Becky Nedelman.

Today, they meet at Emily Lawrence’s home, where she has prepared peanut butter cookies and an elaborate cheese board for the occasion.

With each passing year, the sentimental value only swells.

“The longer it goes on, the more important we become to one another. We’re the age where we occasionally lose friends; we lose husbands — lots of us have. So, this is very important,” says Nancy deBrier, one of the members. The group credits the book club’s enduring success to its organizer, Becky Nedelman.

Nedelman has assembled the book club over the decades, inviting women from different parts of her life, including investment clubs and Planned Parenthood organizing along with high school classmates. In the end, she chose members who were serious about books.

Host Emily Lawrence with her copy of Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays.”

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

“We wanted to be with a group of women who were really readers. We didn’t come to talk about recipes or kids and grandkids, but we really wanted to focus on the book,” says Nedelman.

Since June 2001, the group has read 252 books together, maintaining a detailed record of every book. The group mostly reads contemporary literature, but once a year, they tackle a classic — or “a downer,” as they’ve come to call them.

“Apeirogon” by Colum McCann and “The Correspondent” by Virginia Evans stand out to them as particularly engaging. They read “Anna Karenina” and “Crime and Punishment,” an experience they agree was challenging but rewarding. Their commentary is astute and heartfelt, even when it’s critical. “Are any of the classics fun?” asks Harriet Eilber.

What makes a book club run so smoothly for over two decades? Gail Heltzer attributes it to the group’s open-mindedness and inherent chemistry. “Everybody is willing to read a wide variety of books on different subjects. We don’t reject any ideas,” says Heltzer. “Everybody has opinions and is extremely respectful, and everyone leaves smarter.”

The book club has encouraged the women to reconnect with reading later in life. DeBrier, who has a master’s degree and practiced law, explains that reading has been a gift throughout her life. “My reading life post-college was so much more interesting in many ways,” she says. “You’ll find that that’s the good thing about life, right? It’s very enriching to keep reading.”

“Their open-mindedness at their age is really inspiring to me,” says Silverberg. “I hope to have that open-mindedness in my 80s and 90s. What is a better path for open-mindedness than to read?”

To ensure the book club runs efficiently with riveting discussions, the women have enlisted the help of Literary Affairs — an L.A.-based company that offers facilitators at over 50 book clubs in L.A. The facilitators often have exceptional literary resumes; many are novelists and hold PhDs in literature. Silverberg, the facilitator of Becky’s Book Club, is also a novelist and comedian and has worked for Literary Affairs for five years. Last year, her debut novel, “First Time, Long Time,” was released — and the book club attended her book launch at Skylight Books in Los Feliz to offer support.

“Whether they like the book or not, they’re always willing to turn the page,” says Silverberg of the group. She enjoys the hour and a half she spends discussing literature with them. “They make me think about a book differently, and I appreciate that. They let me argue with them. I’m always on the side of the book.”

The book club has been meeting together for over 25 years and has read more than 250 books.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

During today’s discussion, Silverberg bravely makes a case for “Play It as It Lays.” The women stare back at her with sullen but intrigued faces. Silverberg reads a passage of the novel to the group. Her voice is light but insistent. “She’s so at the mercy of the men in her life,” says Silverberg.

“That was the ‘60s,” retorts Weiman. In spite of their initial resistance, Didion’s writing pulls buried recollections to the surface. At times, the novels stir up memories from the women’s lives, prompting poignant, often vulnerable discussions. DeBrier reflects on her own experience of motherhood in the 1960s. “I was having a baby — I didn’t know what existential meant,” she remarks.

Later, the women share memories on the 1960s sociopolitical issues of birth control, homosexuality and the Vietnam War. They maintain that they had a hopefulness that contrasts with Didion’s protagonist.

“Despite how bad things were in the middle of the war, I did not consider everything bleak,” says Heltzer. “I knew that we were going to keep trying and the people were going to help move the nation.”

The conversation shifts into a broader reflection on womanhood.

“I always had a free mindset about what I wanted to do. Until my 20s, when I got married, I didn’t realize I had choices in my marriage,” reflects Weiman. She feels Didion’s novel urges women to reconnect with themselves, using protagonist Maria as a cautionary tale. “What she did then was a gift to all women — in writing this novel.”

At the end of the book club, the women break into convivial chatter. They hover around the cheeseboard and cookies. Emily Lawrence showcases her collection of first-edition William Carlos Williams poetry. She has a growing collection of books that she would like to donate to the Palisades branch library, which was destroyed in the 2025 fires. With Lawrence’s donations, her aim is for the Palisades to begin to enjoy new stories, new characters and new beginnings in the wake of disaster. Perhaps evoking an oft-quoted Didion quote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.”

Connors is a writer living in Los Angeles. She hosts the literary reading event Unreliable Narrators at Nico’s Wines in Atwater Village every month.

Telling her life story — naked onstage — was the only way.

That much, Pamela Redmond was sure of.

It was a sweltering July afternoon last year and Redmond was sitting on the sofa in her Hollywood home stewing over how AI was nearly putting her out of business. At 72, she had published 20 books, seven of them works of fiction, and she’d even sold one novel, “Younger,” as a hit television series. She was the founder of the largest baby naming website online which, as a single divorcee, was her lifeline financially (and meant to be her retirement). But AI had scraped her website’s content and used it to rank itself higher in search results; her company’s revenue had plummeted by about half and she’d had to let employees go.

“I thought: What can I bring to the conversation that AI can’t?” Redmond says. “And then it came to me: a body!”

She felt compelled to create an in-person experience that was distinctly human — something true and personal — the antithesis of the digitally-saturated, fragmented and ephemeral world we live in, where truth is often opaque. Though she had zero theatrical experience, not even in a high school musical, theater is what came to mind.

“I decided I wanted to tell the story of my life, as told by my body. That’s how I came up with a one-woman show, ‘Old Woman Naked.’”

Telling me this, Redmond is sitting in a hot tub, nude, at Wi Spa in Koreatown. As am I. Because interviewing Redmond — naked in an intimate setting — seemed the best way to have a personal conversation about such a revealing topic. We’ve been friends for several years and it made sense to visit the Korean spa, at which we both feel comfortable.

Redmond sinks deeper into the steaming bath, the water level rising to her decolletage, leaving her face flushed as beads of sweat drip down the curve of her neck.

“Old Woman Naked” is about Redmond, but it’s also about being in a woman’s body, in America, at a certain time — from the pre-internet, ‘50s and ‘60s until today. Redmond performed it for one night only in New York City at the Laurie Beechman Theatre in October, directed and produced by Janice Maffei — just 10 weeks after she had conceived of it. The show opens April 29 in Los Angeles at the Broadwater in Hollywood for three nights, directed by Jennifer Chambers (“POTUS”). Kate Juergens and Jenn Gerstenblatt, both formerly of ABC Family, produced it.

In the hour-long performance, Redmond stands on a bare stage and tells intimate stories she hasn’t shared with anyone until now, not even her former husband of 33 years, her three children or her best girlfriends. She tells of her first stirrings of lust while she was growing up in Norwood, N.J., sparked by the desire to touch her best girlfriend’s breasts; she tells of being a 19-year-old child bride and how her new father-in-law took her to a strip club shortly after the wedding; she tells of her jealous first husband who, when she tried to leave him, held a knife to her throat and tried to rape her.

But she also tells of the thrill, and all-consuming love, tangled up in having children; of creative reinvention and late-life success publishing a novel at 50, creating an internet company at 55 and selling a book as a TV show at 60; and of the absolute freedom she felt after menopause, when she could no longer have children and her body, at long last, belonged only to her.

Pamela Redmond performs “Old Woman Naked” in New York in October 2025. (Scott Hoffmann)

As Redmond performs these stories during the show, she takes off her clothing, piece by piece, often cleverly stitched into the storytelling. At 11 years old, she explains onstage, she was desperate to wear a bra. “Now I feel like I’m 11, but with a drawer full of bras I never want to wear,” she reveals, letting the undergarment drop to the ground. By the end of the show, Redmond is facing the audience entirely naked.

Ultimately, that moment is the point of the show: proudly bringing an image that’s been culturally steeped in taboo and shame — that of an older woman’s bare body, with all its folds and dimples and curves — into the light.

“I wanted to show people what an older woman’s body actually looked like,” Redmond says. “Young women take their clothes off all the time, they’re scantily dressed onstage or using their body and their sexuality as part of their art. But older women — it’s just not seen. Or it’s seen as ugly. I knew right away: This is intrinsically different and kind of radical.”

Even as she was researching the show, Redmond became increasingly aware of the extent to which older women’s nude bodies “have been so hidden away.”

“There is so little art, so little pop culture [showing it],” she says. “I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the fourth-largest museum in the world, and searched their archives and there are six images from all of history. In the Louvre [in Paris], there are three drawings that show old women naked — and they’re grotesque. Representation is really important. It matters.”

Pamela Redmond, right, tells Times writer Deborah Vankin that she felt “on fire” writing her solo show. “I wanted to show people what an older woman’s body actually looked like.”

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Redmond says she wasn’t nervous about being nude in front of a live audience. “I’ve been through so many things in my life that have been kind of harrowing,” she says. “I was scared about not remembering my lines. That terrified me!” But Redmond doesn’t consider herself an exhibitionist, either. She’s had a love-hate relationship with her body throughout her lifetime, she says. “You know, gaining and losing the same 40 pounds over and over.”

At one moment in the show, Redmond shows an overhead slide of herself at 22, posing for an artist friend, nude. She looks up at the image, admitting: “Look at me, I was a goddess. I had no idea. I thought I was fat, unfashionably curvy and unattractive.”

If there is a message to the show, Redmond says, it’s that “you are the sum of everything you’ve been and everything you’ve done. And to see yourself not just as this old body but as someone who’s lived this incredibly rich life in this body that has taken you through this incredible range of experiences.”

“Old Woman Naked” hit a nerve that night in New York, Redmond says. Audience members — mostly women, older and younger — came up to her afterward and revealed personal stories they hadn’t told anyone to date. Other women said they were inspired by the play or felt they’d been given newfound freedom to be themselves.

Redmond has since fleshed out the Los Angeles version of the show, going deeper into stories and punching up the jokes.

She also sees “Old Woman Naked” as a much bigger creative gesture than a limited run solo show. She hopes to write a book expanding on the ideas in the show and, separately, self-publish the script to sell in the theater lobby, afterward. She’s thinking about a titular podcast, in which she’d interview women of different ages about their bodies and their lives. And she’s working with a theater director to develop the script of “Old Woman Naked” for a celebrity to star in.

Pamela Redmond, left, relaxes with Times writer Deborah Vankin at Wi Spa in Koreatown.

“I see it as Jessica Lange on Broadway,” Redmond says. “It’s like stealth feminism: They come for the nudity, they leave with their views of women’s bodies totally revolutionized. I want this to be a bigger conversation about women, aging, bodies, humanity, owning our individuality and uniqueness — and celebrating that.”

So what does Redmond see now, when she looks at her body in the mirror?

“I think I look great. I like what I see. I like my smile,” she says. “I’m good.”

Stepping out into the sunlit parking lot after our spa day, that smile is on full display.

“That was so fun,” Redmond says. “Our conversation — everything we talked about — it’s different when you’re naked, it really is. You’re just more open, more vulnerable.”

She takes a seat in the shade, waiting for the valet to bring her car.

“It’s the same with the show, the conversation I wanted to have with the audience. That’s why it had to be: ‘Old Woman Naked.’”

“Old Woman Naked” plays at the Broadwater, in Hollywood, April 29-30 and May 17. Tickets: $35.