Play by Jess Taylor
Play
by Jess Taylor
Book*hug Press, 2024; 354 pages; $23
Reviewed by Jessica Key
Play is a powerful and haunting debut novel from Jess Taylor, author of short story collections Pauls and Lambda-finalist Just Pervs. Literary, psychological, and compassionate — a stark but empathetic reminder of the ways our pasts shape us, as the novel’s protagonist Paul navigates her healing journey from PTSD after being confronted with her childhood trauma.
As children, The Lighted City was a refuge for Paul and her beloved cousin Adrian — a made-up place to escape homes that were far too fraught and sad. But as we come to discover throughout the novel, The Lighted City itself, a place supposed to be full of light and warmth, has its own darkness and danger — exploring both the beautiful escape of imagination and the potential perils of it.
As an adult Paul reflects: “the grief has always been there. I thought it would go away, but instead it changed: sometimes it swells up and takes me over, and others, it’s quiet in the background, like a jazz record someone forgot to turn off.” And yet, while grief and dread are a constant presence for Paul throughout the novel, Taylor interjects light and hope with her beautiful prose and deeply meaningful insights throughout about the power of art and connection — something that felt entirely necessary when reading a book that covers topics as heavy as this one.
The story is told through alternating time periods in Paul’s life: in the present day, May 2016, and in her childhood. The plot reveals itself slowly through this fragmented narrative — similar to the way trauma survivors process repressed memories. It makes sense — sometimes you truly can’t think straight when you’re dealing with something horrible that happened. Many of the details are revealed in part through Paul’s therapy sessions.
In some ways, this slow progress can feel excruciating — as the reader, you continue to be teased with the revelation of what happened, and as you know it will be achingly horrible, you just want to get it over with. But, perhaps, in other ways, this teased out narrative could help make the extremely traumatic events of Paul’s past, and the myriad ways she was failed over and over, easier to digest.
One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the book was seeing how those failures, and the trauma they inflicted, fundamentally informed how Paul viewed herself: “part of me felt like I’d come into the world screaming and wounded, knowing all the heartache that would fall on me and those around me. That I knew the unseen heartaches, that everywhere in the world there were people going through pain, and that I hummed with a painful, invisible empathy for them that I was unable to turn off.”
Haunting, raw, genuine, and as non-linear as the healing process itself, this is a novel that will linger long after you’ve closed its pages.