A landmark exploration of one of the most consequential and pervasive issues of our time–sexual violence—from New York Times Magazine contributor Jen Percy, blending investigative reportage and memoir to explore the misunderstood ways women survive and forever carry trauma.

From her own girlhood in rural Oregon, Jen Percy has long contemplated the intergenerational trauma passed down through three generations of women, drawing from the survival lessons of her naturalist mother and her grandmother, who fled to a woman-led cult. But as a young woman, she is confounded by her own passive responses to male attention, setting off a broader inquiry into how fear shapes behavior.

Through personal narrative and a chorus of voices from across the world, Percy examines psychic disconnection, freezing, hypersexuality, near-death experiences, and the evolutionary instincts that emerge in moments of peril. She takes on taboo subjects—female orgasms during assault, female rage, and pleasing behaviors—illuminating how society misreads these acts as deviant or pathological, rather than as brilliant acts of self-preservation. Her work challenges the rigid cultural scripts that define what a “real victim” should look like, and how we misunderstand passivity, wildness, and survival in the context of sex and violence.

Girls Play Dead ultimately dismantles the assumptions underpinning sexual trauma narratives—especially how trauma disrupts time, language, and memory, making conventional storytelling nearly impossible. In the courtroom and in public discourse, women’s normal trauma responses are often dismissed or discredited. Percy asks why we lack language that honestly reflects these experiences—and why the cost of misunderstanding is still so high. With the intellectual rigor of Janet Malcolm and the sensibility of Joan Didion, Percy offers a deeply reported, fiercely lyrical work that reframes trauma not as weakness, but as a complex expression of resistance and survival.