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Acts of Self-Preservation
by Jen Percy
National Magazine Award–winner and author of the New York Times Notable Book Demon Camp, Jen Percy returns with a devastating exploration of womanhood and survival in this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction.
What does it mean to endure as a woman? Percy, who has written extensively on trauma responses and PTSD, revisits these subjects using her personal experience, including sexual assault, to examine a broader social and cultural history of trauma. Beginning with her childhood in rural Oregon, Percy dissects the moments that shaped her girlhood. She learns from her mother, who teaches her wilderness survival strategies (and who eventually joins a cult), and she interrogates the biological basis for "freezing," or tonic immobility, that is instinctual for humans in moments of physical danger. Percy's writing chronicles women venturing into fantasies, cults, and hypnosis in order to cope with suffering and abuse.
This is a book about women forced to play dead, and others fighting for their lives. It follows women in bunkers preparing for the apocalypse when the apocalypse might be embodied by the person darkening their door and women imprisoned for killing their attackers, all in an effort to better understand how people get stuck in inescapable circumstances—of domestic abuse, sexual assault, and vigilantism. Percy depicts the thrilling grit it takes to escape such evil and overcome moments of paralysis when women are so often conditioned by the myth of "fight or flight."
In electrifying prose, reminiscent of Joan Didion and Robert Kolker, Percy combines personal and cultural history, psychology, and reportage to deliver an astonishing examination of the malignant forces women face in the everyday, and the depths forged by the American character to confront them.
"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 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
"Percy's inquiry embraces contradiction ... Accessible reading on a difficult and necessary topic." —Booklist
"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
This information about Girls Play Dead was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jen 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 the MacDowell Colony. 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.
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