This Is a Game I Play

This Is a Game I Play chronicles Marie Manilla's coming of age in a large Italian Catholic family in Huntington, West Virginia, during the volatile 1960s and 1970s. As she travels from Texas to Iowa and back to West Virginia, Manilla is clear-eyed about the games she engaged in for attention or survival throughout her adolescence. She confronts her implicit biases and failings, her struggles navigating life with an anxiety disorder, and her ambivalence toward gender roles and expectations for women, such as serving as a caregiver to aging parents, one of whom has dementia.

Woven throughout are games others play. Especially troubling are the countless ways girls and women—Manilla included—fall prey to the wicked games of predatory boys and men, as well as the brutal games the dominant culture plays with people of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and poor folks who live in areas where natural resources are more highly valued than human life. Offering a unique perspective of urban Appalachia, Manilla's essays serve not only as reflections on the self and society but urge readers to consider the games they (un)knowingly play, too.