We Play Ourselves

December 7, 2020
A playwright’s public shame and jealousy traps her in self-doubt in this mordant debut novel from Silverman (after the collection The Island Dwellers). Thirty-three-year-old playwright Cass flees New York after an embarrassing public meltdown in which she deliberately poked her nemesis, Yale senior and hot new playwright Tara-Jean Slater, in the eye. Unlike Tara-Jean’s work, Cass’s first play is a mess. A bad review compounds her sense of failure after having an affair with her married lead actor and having her advances rebuffed by the older French director, who tells her, “There are many kinds of intimacy, it’s so easy to confuse them all.” In Los Angeles, she rooms with a friend who faces an impending breakup with his Australian boyfriend, who still hasn’t come out after a decade together. Cass meets charismatic filmmaker Caroline, who recruits Cass to work on a Fight Club–inspired cinema verité project starring teenage girls. After one of the girls goes missing, Cass learns Caroline is not only manipulative but deceitful. This, plus an illuminating encounter with Tara-Jean, prompts some soul searching. While the ending feels a bit unresolved, Cass’s dark humor and acts of self-sabotage keep the reader engaged. Silverman’s genuine, stirring novel speaks volumes about the lure and fickleness of fame. Agent: Allison Hunter, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

December 1, 2020
An up-and-coming dramatist deals with the fallout of her ambition. Writer and playwright Silverman's debut novel follows a down-on-her-luck artist as she attempts to rebuild her life and career. After 10 years of juggling menial jobs and playwriting, Cass, a 33-year-old New Yorker, gets her big break by winning the Lansing Award--a new prize for emerging playwrights with a $50,000 purse. After she wins the award, she begins to feel legitimacy within the tightknit theater community: "Like a picture coming into focus, my life had been given density and shape by success--and from this new vantage point, I could see that everything behind me had only been a blur." But after a mortifying series of incidents leaves her ostracized in New York, Cass moves in with a friend in Los Angeles and attempts to rebuild her life. Shortly after fleeing, she meets Caroline, the charismatic filmmaker who lives next door, and the pack of eccentric teenage girls who follow her around. When the two women meet, Caroline believes Cass' name is Cath--and Cass does not correct her. Instead, she assumes the role of Cath, whom she sees as her second chance for success--though she doesn't fully understand the consequences at first. Caroline's film follows the ins and outs of the girls' lives and their strange hobby: hosting a female Fight Club (which Caroline calls "a feminist reinterpretation of masculine values"). As Cass becomes closer to the film, she begins to question what she sees--and who exactly is pulling the strings (on- and off-camera). Oscillating back and forth between the past and present, Silverman explores the ways striving for acclaim upends and then reorients Cass' life. The quiet meditations on the precariousness and ever changing nature of success, ambition, and artwork are the novel's greatest strength. A resonant and thoughtful novel.

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December 1, 2020
Thirty-three-year-old playwright Cass flees New York for Los Angeles under a cloud of scandal. Once there, she finds herself improbably working on a documentary film about seven teenage girls who battle each other in a real-life variation on the film Fight Club. Cass, who is queer, realizes that one of the girls, BB, who is also queer, has a killer crush on her, which is ironic since Cass has also fallen in love with an older woman, Helene. As she becomes more involved with the film, Cass' b�te noire, Tara Jean Slater, a younger playwright who is destiny's tot, going effortlessly from success to success, shows up in L.A., to Cass' considerable consternation (Tara Jean was the catalyst for the scandal that changed Cass' life). Things fall apart, ultimately forcing Cass to retreat back home to New Hampshire, where she faces feelings of failure even while the possibility of redemptive change could be on the horizon. Silverman (The Island Dwellers, 2018) employs Cass' wry, deeply felt, often self-deprecating voice to tell this beautifully realized novel about choice, ambition, and revelation, with a nod to feminism in the context of the film and its monstrous director, Caroline. All of Silverman's characters are memorable as they drive the carefully plotted, thought-provoking story. Happily, unlike Cass' failed play, this memorable novel deserves a standing ovation.

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