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. “Percy’s subject is brutal, but her writing allays some of the impact by being almost impossibly beautiful: crisp, vulnerable, lyrical....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 “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 v