Jen Percy
Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation
Doubleday, 2025
I was standing in front of a body of painted glass, layer upon layer of collage, nerve endings and synapses stretching, thinking, trapped in the neural pathways of my mind like white water rapids. Dustin Yellin’s warehouse in Red Hook felt like being trapped in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Standing there, still processing the ending of Girls Play Dead, my own story started to press outward, finding a rough-skin boundary. A friend pulled me away, the same friend who told me on the subway, you get to choose which stories you tell about yourself. By which she meant trauma.
In Jen Percy’s exploration of trauma, she’s getting at:
How it can change our relationships with experience and memory, giving life the feeling of unreality. And women are often wondering if the experiences they’ve had, of deep hurt or victimization, are “real.” Maybe part of that has to do with not being believed, but I think another part has to do with the way trauma affects storytelling.
There’s a lot of stories I’ve told myself, stories I’ve told others, stories that I’ve tucked away and kept at bay. Reading Girls Play Dead, I saw my own reality and unreality weaving in with others.
The basis of Percy’s investigation of storytelling and trauma is, in part, to acknowledge the acts of self preservation our animal bodies have adapted to employ in the face of danger. Many survivors blame themselves and carry the shame of not fighting back. This playing dead, tonic immobility, is involuntary. It’s what happens to sharks when flipped on their backs, frozen, their bellies up to be conquered by the killer whale. Percy writes of a shark stalking her nightmares and daydreams.
Like tonic immobility, dissociation is a survival mechanism. In a section called “Rapture” Percy explores the way rape and ecstasy are entangled. Recounting a story of a South Carolina woman choked and raped in the front seat of a car, she reports having “ascended to a light where she was warm, safe, and whole, and separate from her body.” Near-death experiences like this are reported by some survivors of sexual violence, their minds forced to flee into the light. In a moment of terror, the human mind can rewrite the present in an act of escapism.
In the aftermath of sexual violence, the storytelling is just beginning. Percy takes the reader into the room where police and social workers are being trained on how “traumatic events are more difficult to recount in a linear matter.” When recording the stories of victims, police often write off extremely specific memories during an assault as irrelevant, like a song playing down the hall or the features of a digital clock. For the victim, however, these details are the story. The negation of sometimes critical information, like if a condom was used, is superseded by these imprinted details. Percy notes that survivors are not lying if the story is disjointed, rather the disjointedness points to a trauma-afflicted mind.
Months pass, then years, and many survivors must confront their story in new ways. Percy talks about a patient in therapy after suffering childhood abuse: