Marie Manilla
Writer
COMING OCTOBER 2026
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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 and beyond. 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.
"Marie Manilla's story is a quintessentially American one, though not one we hear enough: a story that embraces the wild if not wicked pluck and resolve of a young girl and woman always having to learn the rules of the game―in love and loss, at home and in places far away and unknown―without losing herself in the process. It's also rare and compelling to see in depth how a writer came into being. Such development on the page requires real intimacy and trust with the reader, which Manilla exercises again and again in This Is a Game I Play―even as she acknowledges the honest struggle and high stakes of being vulnerable in a culture that considers vulnerability an easily exploitable weakness."
―Rachael Peckham, author of Alight: Flights of Prose
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"These essays are a woman's journey, but most of all, they are so compassionately about being human. Many who want to leave what they know too well to find themselves will read this book."
―Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of I Could Name God in Twelve Ways: Essays
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This is a Game I Play is available for preorder from University Press of Kentucky.
Also inquire at your favorite bookstore or online vendor.
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