Picture this: You leave NY because your world is crashing down. Your whole life was the theater, but you've been shunned, you decide to take refuge in LA. Only to realize that it might now be the escape you hoped when you get sucked into the world of your new filmmaking neighbor.

I was in a book slump when I started reading this book, but 20 pages in, and I was hooked. I felt genuinely invested in what Cass -our main character- was going through and had to see how she would perceiver.

Overall what I loved:
-the satirical approach the author wrote the relationship her characters had with the theater and filmmaking
-the story felt well-paced
-the writing was humorous yet still conveyed the main characters gritty, emotional turmoil, often on the same page- if not in the same sentence
-the beautiful prose
-the queer rep

Also, I know we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover BUT how gorgeous is this one?!

📚 I think WE PLAY OURSELVES isn't going to be for everyone - it's a bit wandering, almost none of the characters are likable, there's some really horrific stuff happening in the name of art - but I LOVED IT.
📚 This book is like PLAIN BAD HEROINES + PIZZA GIRL.
📚 I felt Cass on a few levels - trying to make art work, trying to find yourself by dropping out of your life, being an elder millennial trying to understand the universe young queer people live in - whewwww!
📚 Everybody is such a mess, but in a way that feels true to life. I've known (and sometimes been) these women trying to figure out where they belong and how to exist.
📚 There is a painful two-pronged critique of the art world: one thread about how tastemakers jump on what they think is new and cutting edge but it's really the same stuff repackaged in a more soul-crushing way, and another thread about how people in power will put that pain on display and mine it for profit, even when the creator is visibly suffering.
📚 There's also some really good stuff about tokenism and molding people to fit the story in your mind. I do want to point out what at first seems like some nasty asexual rep, but I do think it's pushed back on as much as possible in the moment (and it feeds back into my previous point about people in distress not getting the support they need).

Not for me, but that's okay! I'm not interested in film making or Los Angeles subculture at all, so if you're into those two things then this book is for you!

I think We Play Ourselves is really about acceptance. Accepting your own faults, your own flaws, and your own quirks to truly be okay in your own skin.

I will say, this is definitely not a book for me. However, I can appreciate the beauty in Silverman’s writing and story telling to provide a review. I really felt that the synopsis kind of threw me off as I thought this was a thriller. It’s not.

Also, there’s a part where basically a character attributes their asexuality to childhood trauma. Let’s not. That’s a slap in the face to those who are asexual.

Overall, it was character driven, but the characters were just bad. The writing was well done, but I am still a bit cringe about not some of the “labels” used for some of the sexual identities of the characters.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin for the copy. This is out Tuesday.

3.25 Stars. This was interesting. In the end I don’t think that this book was for me, but I did really like the author’s writing style. The way Silverman writes, got me through a book that I might have really struggled with otherwise. The last two books I’ve read in a row, I have had similar experiences with. The book I reviewed right before this one, I didn’t enjoy and it was my own fault for misreading the blurb. With this book, I actually did not misread anything. The book blurb makes you think that this book is in a certain genre, which it is not. This is contemporary or literary fiction, and is not a thriller with a mystery twist that the blurb leads you to believe. The blurb gave me certain expectations, that the book just could not meet, and I don’t think that is fair to the author. I know it may be too late, with the book coming out in only two days, but I would change the blurb so readers are not disappointed and so this book will be targeted to the right audience.

This is a first person story about Cass, a playwright, who flees to L.A. after a scandal of her own making. Cass wants to reinvent herself and gets sucked into the world of indie moviemaking about a group of teenage girls who have their own “Fight Club”. We get to see, through flashbacks, Cass success as a playwright, her downfall, and what her life is like now in L.A. in present time. It’s an odd premise for sure, and the story gets even weirder as you read it. I kept waiting for the mystery/thriller part to happen and was left scratching my head wondering “what am I reading?” when it didn’t.

One of the issues I had was that Cass is not the easiest character to like. It’s tough being in first person POV with someone you are struggling to connect with. She can be very self-centered, jealous, has a real woe is me attitude, and loves to run when anything gets tough. I don’t know that I can say if she ever really grew in the end, but I did find her a little more palatable as the book went on. Her relationship with one of the teenagers named BB –Cass is bisexual and BB is queer, so they seemed to bond over that plus Cass just knew how to really talk to BB- these scenes ended up being some of my favorite. They showed Cass in a better light and the character of BB really was the most interesting character of the whole book.

I have to mention that I’m a bit disappointed in the end. Maybe it is just not that kind of book, but I really wanted some better closure. Towards the end Cass seemed to be doing better, she was making amends to people and sticking up for herself, but then she fell into an old bad habit, which seemed to stop any growth I thought was happening. You see a spark of something at the end, but I was left saying “that’s it?” I feel like I spent a good amount of time on this book and I needed something more than the ending we get.

In the end, this was not the book I thought I was getting and I had a few issues that were pretty big. On the goods side, I really liked Silverman’s writing. This sounds a little weird, but her writing style felt good to read. I would read another book by her in a heartbeat, just to have more of that good reading feel. I wasn’t crazy about some of her story choices, but she is clearly a talented writer.

"We Play Ourselves" by Jen Silverman is a well written, but overall plot is silly and a clear-rip off of "Fight Club". The protagonist, Cass is an unhappy and insufferable playwright. She constantly goes on and on about how she's been screwed over by other people, when in reality, she's to blame for lack of success. She has no self-awareness. I don't mind reading a deeply-flawed character, but I just felt like Cass never learned any lessons throughout this novel. The teenage dingbats she meets next door are garbage people. No, thank you! Very average and underwhelming. Such a shame. The cover art is beautiful though.

Thank you, Netgalley and Random House for the digital ARC.

Release date: February 9, 2021

DNF quit reading after the teenage girl tampon insertion scene. The whole girl fight club movie seemed exploitive and although that may be the point, I don't want to keep cringe reading.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

We Play Ourselves follows the character development of Cass, but doesn't come to a satisfying, self-aware conclusion. Cass is a playwright in New York, who has unwittingly won an award for her small, self-produced plays. She gets a shot at success, and when she gets a bad review, she implodes. Cass then escapes to Los Angeles and meets Caroline, who feels like a stereotype. She's an enigmatic Hollywood something that only cares about her art and can't even get Cass's name right. So the newly christened "Cath" tries shedding her Cassness and helps Caroline develop a feminist film about teenage girls in a fight club. It's clear from the beginning that Caroline doesn't care about anything but herself and her movie, but Cass is still shocked when she finds this out. The story peters out with Cass, now reverted to her childhood name "Cassie," returning to her childhood home to restore "mediocrity" to her life.

The story is lacking, but the writing is well-crafted. The author offers some great commentary on society, especially in its treatment of women. The prose is filled with poignant anecdotes and timely ideas that don't always relate to the actual story. The plot comes secondary to the main character's inner dialogue, which shifts back and forth between past and present. Cass doesn't seem like an active participant in her life, as most of the story happens to her and around her.

Let's not forget about the bi-erasure, which felt out of place in an otherwise progressive novel. Apparently we can only say the word "bisexual" in media if it's treated like a foreign concept. Also, the main character doesn't respect professional boundaries or consent, so that's not great.

I really wanted to get into this book because the premise sounds so interesting. However, I had such a hard time relating to Cass when she had been given so many opportunities. This was more of a fault of my own to have different expectations for this book than what was actually given.

“Fight Club,” but with girls!

If that sounds like a problematic movie that you’d probably watch anyway, you’re in the same boat as Cass, a playwright who gets drawn into an exploitative film shoot in Jen Silverman’s knowing new novel. Thank you Random House for the free book.

29 / review: we play ourselves by jen silverman
📆PUB DATE: February 9, 2021

💬”Teenage girls, unless they’re using their bodies as currency, as commodities of desire, they’re unseen.”
📚Cass flees from her life in New York when her career and personal life are decimated by scandal and gets drawn into the orbit of a charismatic LA film maker who is working on her next film: a documentary about a teenage girl fight club that attempts to turn the misinterpretation of the classic novel/film into a feminist........? something? Honestly that whole thing was a little murky.
👍The book presents an fun satire of both Theatre & Film cultures and the absurdity of what it means to be an artist and to peruse fame. The parallels of Cass’s life unraveling in New York just as it’s getting started and getting pulled into Caroline’s career when it seems to be declining presents a compelling timeline of the life of a creator. Also, it was so funny that Caroline & her girls were basing their Fight Club but Make It Feminist film off the hyper-masculine cultural misunderstanding of the point of that book. It’s brilliantly derivative, or as Chuck would say: “a copy of a copy of a copy."
👎 I expected this to be more of a triller. When you evoke Fight Club and missing girls in the description, I think readers go in expecting more action. This is definitely a standard litfic character study about fame/art and I read this same book every 3 months. I wanted more story from it and normally I would say that’s on me but the copy is misleading so that’s more on the publisher. AND I can’t walk away from this section without mentioning that this novel does perpetuate one of my least favorite Queer Fic tropes: LGBT stands for “Lesbians, Gays, But some people don’t like labels, and Trans.” WLW authors learn the word BISEXUAL challenge.

VERDICT:
⭐️⭐️—If you ask me tomorrow I might say 3. The style is compelling but the burn out on stories about ~artists~ is real.
📚Companion Recs: The Girls by Emma Cline and Marlena by Julie Buntin
⚠️Content Warning: violence, biphobia, rape, drugs, eating disorders, suicide (via @the.storygraph)

𝑰 𝒉𝒂𝒅 𝒂𝒏 𝒖𝒏𝒔𝒉𝒂𝒌𝒆𝒂𝒃𝒍𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒗𝒊𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒅𝒂𝒚 𝑰 𝒘𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒉𝒊𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 “𝒕𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒑𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒕” (𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒂 𝒑𝒔𝒚𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒄 𝒐𝒏 𝑾𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝑭𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒕𝒉 𝒐𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝒕𝒐𝒍𝒅 𝒎𝒆), 𝒂𝒇𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒉 𝒎𝒚 𝒄𝒂𝒓𝒆𝒆𝒓 𝒘𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒕𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒐𝒇𝒇. 𝑬𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒖𝒑 𝒕𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒕𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒑𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒕 𝒘𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒃𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝑰 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒕𝒆𝒍𝒍 𝒐𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔 𝒉𝒂𝒅 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒌𝒆𝒅 𝒐𝒖𝒕.

We Play Ourselves, even when we’re trying to play at being someone better, more successful. Cass is a queer playwright living in New York, a former “nobody” from New Hampshire who after attending college moved to the city working a variety of jobs to pay her bills. “I made weird downtown plays”, while she is waiting to hit that tipping point. Cass is blown away when she learns that she won the fat $50,000 Lansing Award, along with two other ’emerging playwrights’ full of as much fierce promise as her. Unlike Tara-Jean Slater and Carter Maxwell, her origins are far less impressive but after the win, she has landed herself an off-Broadway debut, and a fancy director to boot- Hélène. Upon their first meeting, she falls for Hélène, wishes she could become as successful, effortless as the beautiful older woman and working beside her she is a better version of herself, someone who works smarter and harder. With everything on track, Cass has finally become someone to know. When entering her name in the google search the results seem to shout “Fierce new voice”! Despite being 33, she feels reborn, screaming with youth. Everyone is hungry for stories about her, particularly her love life, about being queer. Hélène’s attempts to guide her to focus on the work, to promote the play and ignore the flattery, the personal probing that comes with the territory of being a woman, won’t save her. She is upstaged just when she feels like her life, her career is finally taking off. Early in the novel we learn about the trio, Hélène, Tara-Jean Slater (who she isn’t ready to talk about at the start of the novel) Liz, and the ruin that follows. I truly feel we meet her as she is unraveling, dealing with tangled emotions.

Fleeing from New York and the lunacy of her actions, which are very public, she has a lot of time to reflect on everything that rushed at her. Time to try and define why she acted out as she did. Nothing sinks your ship faster than public humiliation. Suddenly, no one is taking her calls and she has moved further away from the finish line with every ambition fleeing. If she finally had ‘people’ with her promising, emerging voice, those days are over. She hides in LA at her friend Dylan’s place, avoiding the disaster she left behind. She meets the neighbor Caroline, curious about the teenaged girls that come and go from her place. Soon, she spends her time next door where she becomes Cath and can forget she was ever stupid Cass (Caroline misheard her name). Here, there is constant noise, people always around , the house ‘an epicenter of activity’. Cass discovers that Caroline is making a semi-documentary about a violent Fight Club, all female. The girls want to be famous, more than anything, famous for nothing in particular, it doesn’t matter- just famous! But how much do they get exploited for this attention, this fame? Caroline is focused on feminism, thinking about every detail, attempting to avoid ‘fetishizing’ the female body, honing in on race. Again Cass is falling under the spell of a riveting, talented woman trying to say something to the world. Understanding she’d volunteer to be a part of the filming just as eagerly as the teen girls. Caroline is gutsy, an answer to sexism, and Cass is exhilarated by her enthusiasm, her message- even if it is distorted. Important work takes risk, sacrifice, a person who is ‘certain’ about their work- Cass admires these qualities in Caroline. Being involved in this project takes the sting out of her own failings, particularly the pains in her heart and her intense, lingering feelings for Hélène. She has time to think about the past. Why do some people fill in the role of nemesis in our story? Her hatred for Tara-Jean Slater takes peculiar turns, and yet this burning anger always leads her back to herself. It is both horrific and funny how she derails her life. Sometimes we are the saboteurs of our future. Sometimes we have to burn it all down to figure out where we fit. Through Caroline’s ambitions, that mow over any obstacle living or dead in the way, she learns a lot about herself and the poison of ambition. When a girl she has come to know goes missing, and the details leading up to her vanishing sound warning alarms in Cass, she is troubled. There is something Cass identifies with about all the girls, and this turn of events has her feeling responsible. It is the catalyst that may well force Cass to get out of her own way. How much is excused in the pursuit of art or success? What exactly does fame look like? Why do we even want it?

Love, ambition, feminism, self-sabotage, the performance we put on for others, for ourselves-so much happens in this novel. It is about being reborn, but not necessarily as the thing you envisioned. An intelligent novel that the young and old can relate to.

Publication Date: February 9, 2021

Random House

How do you define success? If there's one thing we learn quickly, it's that our personal definition of success is unique to our experiences. The relativity of the definition of success is what Jen Silverman explores in We Play Ourselves.

They say the faster you rise, the harder you fall. Unfortunately, this appears to be true for Cass. After her newest play is chosen as one of the recipients of an esteemed award, Cass goes from being a no-name writer to the type of person who has "people" very quickly. After she makes a mistake that turns her into the prime target of online shaming, Cass moves across the country to Los Angeles to lay low and start over. Upon arriving in Los Angeles, Cass meets an enigmatic documentarian, Caroline, and quickly becomes involved in the making of Caroline's new film. Cass can already feel it: a new life with new opportunities and this time she'll really have it all. But when do things ever work out the way we want them to?

I knew I was hooked to We Play Ourselves within the first 10 pages. Silverman's pragmatic writing style makes it feel as if every sentence is wrapped up in ribbons of emotion, humor, and reality. The way the writing emanated raw emotions from me was almost overwhelming, but in a good way. I constantly found myself being moved by what the characters were feeling even if I couldn't relate to the circumstances. If you've been through a heartbreak or made a mistake that ruined your chances at something, then it doesn't matter what the specifics of the situation are, because you remember what it's like to feel that way.

The strong emotions helped make the characters relatable as well. Everyone in this story is going through their own thing from personal failure to a hard breakup to trying to establish their identity. Along with their struggles, each character proved themself capable of making mistakes. Some mistakes were small, but many were large and ugly. This helped the characters feel real and it sometimes felt like I was right there with them. While the story only really focuses on Cass' mistakes, the inclusion of mistakes made by others is a simple reminder that to make a mistake is to be human and that we can learn, as Cass does, from others.

At the heart of this story is the exploration of success and failure. While those two concepts are considered opposites, isn't it really just our perception of them that gives them meaning? I believe everyone will have a moment in their life where We Play Ourselves will help them come to terms with what they're experiencing. The lessons in this story are easily applied to the real world if you're just willing to let them in. When that time comes for me, I know exactly where to turn.

I received a free eARC from NetGalley in exchange for the promise of an honest review.

Wow! This book really surprised me. While the description is misleading (it makes it seem like it is a thriller, when it very much is not) I was more than okay with the direction this story went. I loved the discussions of age, gender, sexuality, intimacy, and connection, and found the prose beautiful. Seeing as this is a story about a playwright from New York and a filmmaker from LA, the writing and story itself can feel pretentious at some times, but for good reason. I think the parallels of the filming of the girls going through their everyday and the writing of Cass going through her everyday were lovely. All the characters are extremely flawed, and feel very real because of that. My few complaints were with text-specific things- while Caroline talks about the tokenism of BIPOC characters, it was glaringly obvious that the story itself only had two BIPOC characters, and it felt like while the author was trying to make a comment on that, she was also guilty of that exact thing. As well, I did not think that one character saying she "chose" to be asexual as a result of childhood trauma was handled in the best way- I understood what was being said but it felt like the character was implying that sexuality is a choice. All in all, I enjoyed every minute I spent with Cass and her incredibly flawed and complex life. This book won't be for everyone, but it certainly was for me.

Trigger warnings for violence, mentions of child sexual abuse, eye trauma, mentions of suicide, mentions of addiction/overdose.

Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman explores our relationship to ourselves - how we "play" our identities out for our family, our friends, our competitors, and so on. While this bears out much more literally for Cass, a thirty-something woman who flees to LA from New York after an "incident," it definitely applies to everyone in this day and age, especially on social media. It even goes so far as to examine how we perform our ideals - feminism, antiracism, etc. Caroline's "fight club" movie goes to great lengths to play out identities on screen without considering who the girls are underneath the facade.

This book is not interested in providing likable characters or an ending wrapped in a bow, which I appreciate! This book would have felt inauthentic (ha) if it left us with a happy final ending for Cass, achieving everything she dreamed. However, the ending we get isn't doom and gloom either.

I will say that a few plot points in this felt over the top, but none so extreme that they pulled me out entirely. I liked the plot of the book and enjoyed the message. And, like other reviewers have mentioned, this is not a crime novel or thriller. A teen girl goes missing, but it is a plot point within a much larger story and is not the "mystery" of the book. While the summary might not help the book get into the right hands, I do think a readership is out there. And I really enjoyed this.

This was a surprisingly incredible dark book! I feel like the marketing of it being a "queer" story is a little off, it doesn't center around that nearly as much as I expected it to. Overall I liked this intense, gripping millennial story.

I feel like the summary blurb was misleading. I am not sure who decided to market this as "LGBTQIA" or as a thriller. Cass is queer, but that's it. I was really hoping for a story with the representation of varying different people in these categories and for that to impact on the plot progression. It is mentioned mostly off-handed as Cass is queer and has several interactions with her sexuality. I still enjoyed the representation of a strong, feminist woman who is fully secure in her queer identity. The book's description focused on the disappearance of one of the girls and made it seem like it would be a huge pivotal point, It doesn't. Not even close. It plays into the story a little bit, but not in the way they make it sound so I went into this thinking that this book would be more about finding a missing girl, but that ended up only being a small part of the story. For people looking for a contemporary crime novel, this not NOT it. This book definitely touches on some dark topics, as well. Be warned of some violence, mentions of sexual assault and abuse, suicide talk, and manipulation. I really appreciated the overall message of the book, that everyone has many lives and paths within them and any failure is not too big to bounce back from and make something new (and maybe unexpected) out of your life. I think it’s an important and timeless message, one that I and definitely other people can definitely relate to. I recognize how unlikable Cass is, but I actually like unlikeable characters. So, while this book wasn't exactly what I was expecting, it was also a nice surprise.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed its dark but realistic take on the world of success and how you can learn to love less than you have.

We Play Ourselves follows Cass, a 33-year-old emerging playwright, as she flees from a mysterious personal scandal in the New York theatre scene to the relative obscurity of her friend's home in Los Angeles. There, drifting, she becomes swept up into the orbit of the charming, erratic filmmaker next door and her current project: a gritty documentary-like film following a group of teen girls who gather in secret for violent square-offs in the style of Fight Club. As production wears on and Cass' life revolves increasingly around the project — for lack of any creative endeavours or inspiration of her own — the lines between the film's fiction and real life begin to blur and Cass is left to question what success is truly worth to her.

Some things that I loved:
- The writing! There's something about Silverman's prose that truly elevated this to the next level for me. There's humour and emotion and a truly gripping style of writing that kept me engaged throughout
- The characters are messy, messy, messy, and so human for all their ridiculousness. Many of them were insufferable, and yet I loved that. Though this novel serves as a very close examination of Cass herself and we don't get nearly as much development from the side characters, it remained clear throughout just how multi-layered the people surrounding her all were. We really don't get a lot of resolutions, which was refreshing
- The exploration and satirization of both the theatre and film scenes, which was funny and (delightfully) grating in near equal measure
- Cass' story in relation to her age. She's 33, and she's struggling. She's fumbles over and over again. She hasn't got much at all figured out
- The authentic queerness of it all and specifically the bisexual representation. This isn't a love story or a story about Cass' queerness, but it's there all throughout in the way that queerness simply is a part of queer folks' lives. That's something I've struggled to find in other works and it stood out to me here for the sheer ease of it

At its core, this book meditates on success and failure, devotion to one's craft, humanity, and ambition. There's ample exploration of desire, queer existence, and the mess of life. The third act in particular brings a marked shift in the novel's tone and really brought things home for me. As a queer woman in the creative scene, struggling with feelings of inadequacy and what success means to me, I needed this novel, and I feel like so many others do as well.

I do want to address a few things I liked less, though, specifically in terms of representation. It's tricky in a book like this to determine what's intended as commentary or human flaws vs intentional statements, but I want to give a heads up about some of the content all the same:
- One self-identified asexual character attributes their asexuality to childhood trauma, which is an all too familiar trope and one I'd like to see less of
- The film we spend much of the book following the production of features two token BIPOC and one token gay character. This is all depicted in a very self aware and intentional manner and the token gay film character is balanced against the novel's cast of several queer characters, but given the overall whiteness of the novel's cast, the BIPOC tokenism is still a bit rough to read

TW: infidelity, blood, violence, homophobic slurs, biphobia, adult-minor relationship. Mentioned: incest, rape, pedophilia, suicide, eating disorder, drug abuse

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for providing this e-arc

Cass is a mess. Just...floating through lift, escaping her own mistakes and trying to hide from the truth.

Cass arrives in LA in shame. She's left New York in a hurry - after the 'incident' with Tara Jean Slater. A once rising playwright, Cass has set fire to her career in a fit of jealousy. Once in LA, she meets a filmmaker in the middle of her next film about a group of young women. Cass finds herself immeshed in the film and in the lives of the girls.

What this book does best is explore emotions. Cass's fear of failure, her actual reckoning with the truth, jealousy, lust, pain and finally, acceptance. The reader is sucked into the story - I felt like I was Cass - with a spiral of confusion, anger and fear in the pit of my stomach.

This is excellent writing and storytelling from Jen Silverman and I'm excited to see what she does next.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

First of all, the summary of We Play Ourselves is misleading. It makes it sound like a thriller focused around the disappearance of a teenage girl. It's not a thriller, and going into this book expecting it to be will result in disappointment. The disappearance is a tiny part of the story. This is a work of literary fiction centered around Cass, a playwright who flees to LA after intense failure and scandal in New York. Most of the action happens before the start of the story and we learn about it later. It's a character study about Cass coming to terms with her failure and learning how to create again despite it.

I did love Silverman's satire of the New York theater industry. It's not a world I have any experience in, but based on my knowledge of "theater kids" from college, it seems fairly spot on. I laughed and cringed my way through Cass's narration of the New York events. Tara-Jean Slater is an absolute work of art and, ironically, my favorite part of the book. I loved Cass's hate for her, and at some point it became the only thing really pushing me forward with the story. The satire of the LA film industry is just as biting, though not as laugh-out-loud funny for me.

There isn't a single likable character in this book. Which is fine for me; I love a good, unlikable cast. I know this may be a major turn off for others. Unfortunately, I had a difficult time caring about most of the characters. Cass frustrated me to no end; she's right up there with Samantha from Bunny in the list of self-pitying main characters I want to smack. She doesn't even seem to have a legitimate reason for being as whiny as she is. I started out extremely interested in the group of teenage girls who are the focus of the Fight Club-esque film described in the summary. They have so much potential! But they ultimately aren't developed enough; I couldn't tell them apart, and Cass really can't either. B.B. is the only one who stands out, and I found the plotline with her predictable. But Tara-Jean Slater. Oh, Tara-Jean Slater. What a ridiculous person! I spent a good chunk of the book relishing in hating her. And by the end, I didn't hate her. She is the only character I cared about. I'd read a whole book about Tara-Jean Slater.

I had a difficult time getting into this book during the first half. It's slow, and Cass hides the most interesting aspects from us at first. She also does very little but drink and wallow in self-pity. I found myself putting the book down and not wanting to come back to it. The second half switches gears a bit. I ended up finishing it in one sitting. Cass finally starts doing things, and I did find myself enjoying this part. Was it worth the slow and painful buildup? I'm not entirely sure.

Overall, We Play Ourselves is a slow moving character study with some hilarious satire that may be good for fans of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. If you want something fast and thrilling, this is not the book for you.