Books by Jen Percy
PRE-ORDER GIRLS PLAY DEAD
About Girls Play Dead
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.
Since 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 Percy 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 ontaboo subjects—female orgasms during assault, female rage, and people-pleasing behaviors—illuminating how society misreads these acts as deviant or pathological,rather than as brilliant acts of self-preservation. Her work challenges the rigidcultural 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.
“[Percy’s] proper literary predecessor is “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” James Agee’s “inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.” Agee redefined perceptions of poverty in America and the limits of liberalism, of new deals...Agee placed himself inside his story, too. He forced readers to ask, Whom are we leaving behind?”
DEMON CAMP IN THE PRESS
Guernica Magazine, We Kill Ourselves Because We Are Haunted
Harper's, Voice in the Night, November 2013
New York Times Sunday Book Review by Lea Carpenter, author of Eleven Days
New York Times Book Review EDITORS' CHOICE
O Magazine, The Oprah Magazine, BOOK CLUB, 14 Books to Pick up this Month
The Daily Beast, Brian Van Reet, Iraq veteran
Vela Magazine by Lauren Quinn
The Oregonian by Becky Ohlsen
Publisher's Weekly Book of the Week
BuzzFeed Long Reads
San Francisco Gate First sentences
Quivering Pen, David Abrams, author of FOBBIT,
Six Questions Harper's Magazine with Elizabeth Sherman
L.A. Times with Elizabeth Donnelly
Vogue Magazine with Thessaly LaForce
The Atlantic Monthly BY HEART column "Why Stories Not Science Explain the World"
Huffington Post with Ru Freeman
Barnes & Noble Guest Post Blog "Second Language"
Barnes & Noble Interview with Benjamin Percy
Bookforum with Meehan Crist