Reviews with content warning for Pedophilia - We Play Ourselves

wouldn’t had given this a second try without the multiple recommendations from various trusted sources. yes, it’s about theatre and it should’ve hit me harder as a playwright, but it ended up hitting me harder as a constant fuck-up obsessed with “achievements.” (there’s a really killer about LOVING the creation of theatre in the first few pages that really resonated, but) ultimately this is about practicing compassion and tapping into those feral emotions that make us human.

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caseythereader's review

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challenging dark emotional funny mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

📚 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).

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liteartha's review

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emotional hopeful reflective tense medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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 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, art, 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

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