Girls Play Dead

A lyrical and groundbreaking exploration of the misun­derstood ways women survive and forever carry trauma from the award-winning New York Times Magazine writer Jen Percy.
“A groundbreaking exploration of women’s often shamed and silenced responses to sexual assault. . . .Extensive, empathetic. . . .A vital record of a little discussed aspect of women’s lived reality.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
After a childhood spent learning survival strategies in the wilderness, Jen Percy thought she knew how she would respond in the face of danger. But a series of unsettling interactions with men left her feeling betrayed and confounded by her body's passivity. Forced to reckon the myths of her own empowerment, Percy set off a broader inquiry into the way fear shapes behavior in the context of sexual violence, including the strange behaviors of three generations of women in her family.
Drawing on original reporting, years of conversations with survivors, and her own life story, Percy explores the surprising ways in which responses to sexual violence are shaped by both evolutionary instinct and gendered scripts. She takes on taboo subjects—orgasms during assault, sexual promiscuity, female rage, freezing and passivity—illuminating how society misreads these acts as deviance or consent, rather than brilliant acts of self-preservation.
Like Joan Didion, Katherine Boo, and Janet Malcolm, Percy is a fearless cultural critic with a talent for wresting deep truths from lived experiences. Girls Play Dead meaningfully expands the language available to survivors and complicates our expectations of how a trauma story should sound—especially when belief, justice, and healing are contingent on how well a story “makes sense.” Percy examines how trauma corrupts storytelling itself, making survivors’ accounts seem fractured or surreal—and therefore less credible to institutions demanding coherence—resulting in an ambitious testament to the mind as a record of resilience.

JEN PERCY is a contributing writer at New York Times Magazine and recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. She is the author of the nonfiction book Demon Camp, which was a New York Times Notable Book. Percy has received numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize, the National Endowment for the Arts grant, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and MacDowell. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Percy has published essays in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, BookForum, The New Republic, Esquire, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Columbia University.