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)

“Girls Play Dead reads like a novel, exquisitely rendered, and a kind of geography, mapping out the complexities of women’s experiences going ‘down below’ and the specific ways that they come to understand their altered bodies and minds.” 
—Rachel Aviv, New York Times bestselling author of Strangers to Ourselves

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.One of the New York Times' Fall Preview Picks • One of the Washington Post's Fall Preview Picks • One of Kirkus Reviews' Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • One of Lit Hub's Favorite Books of 2025 • One of Harper's Bazaar's Best Books of Fall 2025 • One of The Millions' Great Fall Books

“Riveting and provocative…Percy’s lyrical prose and skilled storytelling make even the most harrowing sequences read like a novel…part of what makes Girls Play Dead so good...is that Percy is not telling readers what to think. She is simply allowing them to feel, by telling the stories—including the messy ones, the ones that are difficult to read and the morally complex ones—that have so often been absent.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Girls Play Dead reads like a novel, exquisitely rendered, and a kind of geography, mapping out the complexities of women’s experiences going 'down below' and the specific ways that they come to understand their altered bodies and minds. Percy is a beautiful writer who somehow finds the narratives that exist in the spaces of the ones we already know.” —Rachel Aviv, New York Times bestselling author of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

“Girls Play Dead is a captivating, myth-busting look at sexual assault….Percy’s writing is consistently lovely, even when her subject is almost unbearably dark. Readers are swept along on the tide of her imagery.” —The Washington Post

“Percy’s subject is brutal, but her writing allays some of the impact by being almost impossibly beautiful: crisp, vulnerable, lyrical....She has a miniaturist’s eye for detail and a raw compassion in her analysis....Her stories, woven together, become something like a fabric, a totality....Girls Play Dead is a vital continuation of [the effort] 'to tell true stories of women’s lives,' in such breadth and definition that the justice system finally has to acknowledge what it’s been obscuring.” — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic

“A brave and clear-eyed look at the ways sexual assault affects women, Jen Percy brings her gimlet eye and scalpel prose to a topic as ugly as it is ubiquitous. This is a work of cultural criticism and self-examination that really does (cliche be damned!) read like a novel. What makes the book beautiful is its stalwart commitment to honesty and compassion.” —The Boston Globe

“Heartbreaking [but] filled with liberating accounts of the varied responses to violence….Percy’s ability to condense and explain traumatic reactions in conversation shows how much of the subject remains woefully underexplored.” —Interview Magazine

“Percy brings her unflinchingly compassionate gaze to trauma suffered by victims of sexual assault....[She] generously threads in her own memories throughout, from her singular upbringing surviving the Oregon wilderness to her own passivity in early sexual experiences with men….Groundbreaking and nuanced.” —Vulture

“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)

“Jen Percy has captured, in the most lyrical and authentic way possible, what it means to be a woman alive today. The threats, the systems, the brutality and the beauty. Girls Play Dead illustrates what our best books can do, what they can say in a time of crisis, and indeed, why we need them for our very survival. I read it, got to the end and immediately began again. It is so full of wisdom and heart and somehow—I don’t know how she’s done it—makes me feel less alone in the world. I am fully in awe of this book.” —Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises and Women We Buried, Women We Burned

“Girls Play Dead is the book I have been waiting for—a book about freezing, frozen women, hysterical women, trembling women, and how these reactions to trauma, insensible as they may outwardly seem, are our purest acts of survival. Jen Percy is a magician.” —Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Man Who Could Move Clouds

“[Jen Percy shows] an immense capacity for empathy and nuance. . . .Percy has done an excellent job of discussing an essential topic with understanding and sensitivity. The openness and willingness to consider the most difficult aspects of an already difficult subject are remarkable, as are the research and the understanding needed to tell these critical stories.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Girls Play Dead is a masterful, prose-driven, consistently surprising literary examination of fear itself. This book will change the way you think about other minds.”
—Kerry Howley, author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

“A rigorous and groundbreaking inquiry, Jen Percy's Girls Play Dead reminds us that there is so much more to understand about women's inner lives and the impact of sexual violence. Percy's entirely fresh perspective is liberating and expansive, as are her luminous descriptions of her unique childhood. The story of a young woman's formative experiences has never been told quite like this.” —Suzy Hansen, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Notes on a Foreign Country

“With Girls Play Dead, Jen Percy captures an entire dimension of women’s experience that until now has remained unnameable. Through several compelling voices, including her own, she tells of the often-surprising ways in which our bodies absorb shames and traumas great and small, and how far our minds can stretch to spin stories that help us survive. So many women have been waiting for a way to have this conversation—and here it is.” —Alex Mar, author of Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy

“[Girls Play Dead] unflinchingly tackles the issue of gender-based sexual violence . . . Drawing from both her own personal history and investigative reporting, Percy is determined to disrupt the ways we are conditioned to think about sexual abuse, intergenerational trauma, and survival.” —Harper's Bazaar

“Percy's inquiry embraces contradiction . . . .Accessible reading on a difficult and necessary topic." —BooklistJEN 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.Girl in the Snow

There is no single anecdote. what i’m talking about is an accumulation.

The man on the subway looks at my friend and me while he rubs his crotch. And us, not knowing how to react, stare ahead, waiting, ignoring it.

The man at the cash register begs me to let him touch my breasts before handing over my purchase: a bag of Skittles.

The gynecologist who says, “Get undressed,” but says, “Keep the motorcycle boots on.” I put my feet in the stirrups, boots on, and he caresses my thigh before he presses the speculum inside.

A man steals my purse and dangles it in front of me like a carrot all the way to his hotel room, where he sets it on the bed. He says that if I want my purse back I have to come get it. I refuse to go in the room and so he dances with the purse and holds it like the body of a woman. He taunts me and I refuse again. But still I wonder, Am I ruining a good time?

The man who says he wants to photograph me shows me the album of naked women. I’m sixteen. I remember how I said yes even though I was thinking, no. Not the word I was hoping to say, not the word I was thinking, anyway.

There’s that professor with a gleaming head who starts panting during class. Maybe a few of us are old enough to drink. He has his eyes closed, arms at his sides while the panting and the moans—­the ohhs and the ahhs—­quicken. He screams and then his loose lips sputter like a balloon. “A female orgasm,” he explains. He lifts a finger in the air, adjusts his blazer, and continues his lecture.

One summer after college I rented a room in a house in Vermont with five men because the rent was cheap. At night when I came home from work they would all be sitting together on the couch watching some sort of porn set in ancient Rome with gladiators and men who looked like Socrates. They always invited me to hang out. And I joined them because I didn’t know what else to do. They were all really nice. They never touched me. There was just the porn, always on. I looked at the television and pretended to happily watch a man fuck a woman in a chariot while thinking about the nice girls who lived down the street in a clean house without porn, without the smell of old sex and old milk, with boyfriends who made love and parents who sent them on sailing trips for their birthdays.

There were times that I felt uncomfortable, or I didn’t want to do what was being asked of me next. But I did. I went along with it, or I didn’t say no, or I didn’t leave, or I didn’t want to be rude, or I thought I was overreacting and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Times when I didn’t make a fuss or whatever.

Here’s the story of the Spanish man. I can still picture him—­the Spaniard—­eyes wet and black like those of a horse, red swimming shorts, flip-flops thin as paper. We were all in Seville and I was studying abroad. He was from the region, and we were all trying to meet locals to practice Spanish. He sat next to me and chewed a rolled cigarette. We met at a house party in a packed room where small blobs of slow-moving red light swam across the floor and up the walls. I was sitting on a couch and he sat down next to me. I turned to speak and he put his tongue in my mouth. When I pulled away his bottom lip glistened. Behind us, shy girls crowded a snack table, spooning blue cake.

I remember the Spaniard and his friends were wearing fake mustaches. He tore off his mustache and handed it to me. In the glue, I spotted flakes of his skin. I put it on, and we laughed.

Later that evening, we walked together through the city’s narrow streets, got lost in them. He showed me the best foods to order, the little snacks, the patatas and the shrimp and the pasta with squid ink. I had never been to Europe. He showed me the squares where everyone drank outside with ice in plastic cups.

He lived nearby and invited me over. We climbed the wooden stairs that spiraled in great wide turns to the top floor. The door to the apartment opened. It was a small apartment with tile floors. We ate sliced ham with melon. I noticed things: photos of saints, a figurine of a camel, ashtrays full of ash. I told him I wasn’t going to have sex with him that night—­that night in Seville. We kissed on the couch, and I said I should be going, but he pulled me closer. That’s okay, he said, and he promised we wouldn’t have sex. We kissed again. He said he wanted us to kiss naked. He wanted to hold me naked. I thought this sounded romantic. We undressed and were on the floor, and then he was going to put on a condom just in case. I thought of saying no one more time, but I was tired and I didn’t want to be rude.

I also didn’t want this to be something I didn’t want.

Rape, I mean.

I kissed him back.

Since we had sex, I wanted to see him again right away. I thought that by seeing him and spending time with him, it would mean we had spent a normal night together and this was a normal relationship. So the next day we explored the city, and I practiced Spanish. He asked me to travel with him to Paris—it was a work trip, but he invited me to come along. I had never been to Paris, and I told him all the things I wanted to do when we got there—­visit the Café des Deux Moulins, walk along the Seine at night—­and we did them. But mostly he left me alone to go work, and I wandered the city or stayed at home and watched the rain fall through the hotel windows. I remember a room so quiet I thought I could hear the flight of a passing bird.

There were always other cities, other work trips. We traveled to Amsterdam and Berlin, and smaller towns whose names I don’t remember. When I told him I was worried about missing classes, he said things like “but you have me.” So I stopped seeing friends and started skipping classes. At the same time, I didn’t see much of him either: I was usually waiting for him to finish work, walking around, then going back to his hotel to have sex I did not enjoy.

I remember, on one of these trips, walking around Amsterdam one spring, when ice still formed on the streets. Everything smelled of fish and cold, the continuous thaw of earth. Snow arrived in quick bursts, falling infrequently but enough to be noticed and despised. The wooden walkway along the port was rotted by the North Sea. Women sat on benches facing the water, against cement walls, drinking out of flasks. Everywhere, pockets of steam lifted into the air. Nearby, a group of drunks were being evicted by the police. One man spun in a circle before he plummeted to the ground, arms spread like a snow angel.

I walked into a nameless bar where the ceiling fan wobbled in a way that felt like another presence in the room. It had rained lightly, but there were cloud breaks in the sky, and it was that time of late afternoon when the light seemed orange instead of white and even a few insects were singing and active, moving along the windows. It was around when I often found myself alone, waiting for the Spaniard.

We didn’t last long, just a few months. But there were times I didn’t hear from him for a week. Two weeks. There were apologies, gifts.

“I loved you then,” he’d say, “I will love you.” As if to make me wait and wonder whether he loved me now. He said I had to be patient. I would be patient, I told him. I would wait.

I thought I was waiting for love. Waiting for warm hands, kind words, but I was also waiting to forget the things I didn’t want—­that night in Seville.

My friend offered me an anecdote stolen from a piece of writing by one of his students. In the story, there was a guy who texted a girl only when he wanted sex. Otherwise, he didn’t talk to her. He ignored her on campus. One night, it’s snowing and below zero, and he tells her to come over. She is outside on the sidewalk. She says: Let me in. He tells her to wait because there’s another girl there and he isn’t sure what he wants—­if he wants to be with her or not. He says he needs to think about it. He orders her to wait. The guy never texts again. The girl waits and waits. She doesn’t have a coat, but she stays, waiting so long she doesn’t notice that she is frozen, that she is dead.

There’s a moment in Helen Garner’s The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power when Garner stops to try to remember her own “experience of being harassed by a man, the actual quality of the experience.” A memory arrives—­an incident from thirty years prior, when the author was on a train out of Melbourne. A man in his forties “who did not appear dangerous” sat beside Garner and started talking to her, all the while shifting his body closer to her own. They talked of horses and family. When the man put his arm around her shoulder, she didn’t stop him. Next he asked Garner to give him a kiss. “I let him kiss me on the lips,” she writes. But she wasn’t sure if she allowed this “out of embarrassment, or politeness, or passivity, or a lack of a clear sense of what she wanted.” There was no violence or force, Garner explains, no threat of any kind, just a steady persistence.

What was my state, that allowed me to accept his unattractive advances without protest? I was just putting up with him. . . . I felt sorry for him. I went on putting up with him long past the point at which I should have told him to back off. Should have? Whose should is this? What I mean is would have liked to. Wanted to but lacked the . . . the . . . Lacked the what?

I earmarked the page and put it away. That was years ago, but I never forgot Garner’s question. I, too, had done things I did not want to do. Mostly I was told I was passive or vulnerable, but it never felt that way to me.

Self-­preservation doesn’t always look like what we imagine it does. The woman who falls asleep next to her abuser isn’t getting comfortable; she’s experiencing the adrenaline dump that follows an experience of primal terror. The woman who lifts her hips to allow her attacker to take off her skirt is reverting to habits conditioned by years of sexism, racism, or abuse.

We learn that pleasing is the best way to react. That it’s good to coax and be sweet. It’s good to say, Do you want something? Can I help you? Do you want a massage? And sometimes we can avoid harm because we bring him some alcohol and he sleeps, and when he wakes we say, How are you?

We might start thinking about an abuser in a positive light; we might text to say: I had a good time last night, did you? Are you going to be at the party? I hope so! To say: You can’t hurt me. Or we might fantasize about him, or spend more time around him, or have sex with him again, as if to say: Look, I’m fine.

A friend recommended I read “The Knife” by Joyce Carol Oates, and so I did. It’s a short story about a mother, Harriet, who’s at home with her young daughter when a robber appears. He doesn’t find much to steal, so he points a knife at Harriet and tells her to get on the bed. Harriet tells the robber that she is afraid of the knife and begs him to put it down, and in response the robber lets her hold it.

And because she holds the knife, she wonders, “Is this rape?” And she wonders this even as the man “pried her legs apart” and “poked himself against her.”

Harriet reports the robbery, but not the rape, because she isn’t sure how to explain the knife and why she did not use it against her attacker.

A lawyer tells me that most sexual assaults are not initiated by an attacker forcing somebody to acquiesce. So how are they able to do it? Why aren’t we getting up and walking out? This was another question that troubled me. A question that contained my own passivity or, at least, accusations of passivity.