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. Traveling into adulthood and from Texas, to Iowa, and back to West Virginia, Manilla is clear-eyed about the games she engaged in for attention or survival. 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 being caregiver to aging parents, including one with dementia.

Woven throughout are games others play. Especially troubling are the countless ways girls and women—Manilla included—have fallen prey to the wicked games of predatory boys and men, as well as the brutal games the dominant culture has played 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 archive of urban Appalachia, Manilla's essays not only serve as reflections on the self and society but urge readers to consider the games they (un)knowingly play, too.