We Play Ourselves

 We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman 322 pages --- I got through 290.

Summary from Goodreads: Not too long ago, Cass was a promising young playwright in New York, hailed as "a fierce new voice" and "queer, feminist, and ready to spill the tea." But at the height of all this attention, Cass finds herself at the center of a searing public shaming, and flees to Los Angeles to escape--and reinvent herself. There she meets her next-door neighbor Caroline, a magnetic filmmaker on the rise, as well as the pack of teenage girls who hang around her house. They are the subjects of Caroline's next semidocumentary movie, which follows the girls' clandestine after-school activity: a Fight Club inspired by the violent classic.

As Cass is drawn into the film's orbit, she is awed by Caroline's drive and confidence. But over time, she becomes troubled by how deeply Caroline is manipulating the teens in the name of art--especially as the consequences become increasingly disturbing. With her past proving hard to shake and her future one she's no longer sure she wants, Cass is forced to reckon with her own ambitions and confront what she has come to believe about the steep price of success. 

And here's what I thought: I really didn't like this book and only made it to the point I did because I really, really wanted to know what happened to the main character that was so scandalous that she had to move to L.A.  Do you want to know? Here's the spoiler -- she gets drunk at a party, and deliberately pokes someone in the eye with her finger. Yes, absolutely incredibly scandalous.  So then, after I got to that point, I tried reading a little more --- but I am not the reader for this book, let's put it that way. I didn't like the main character and found her to be so annoying that I constantly irritated by her. The neighbor is a jerk, the girls being filmed aren't much better. I kept wondering just how Cass was continuing to make it work, sponging off her friend and not working at all (which annoys me to no end, at any rate) to contribute anything to her friend's household.  This character wrote one play, which wasn't even that big of a deal -- so how is the money thing working?  I also felt that Cass is an overwrought kind of character - the constant descriptions of what it means to be a playwright, to be seriously involved in the theatre, the mindset, the culture, the all-encompassing art of it all. It felt to me like the author is writing herself as the main character, immersing herself in this all as the most fascinating character.  Blergh.