I first read Jen Percy’s work in 2023, when she wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine called “What We Misunderstand About Rape.” In the article, she interviewed neuroscientists, psychologists, law enforcement officials, and dozens of victims to investigate the not-so-uncommon trauma response of freezing as an act of survival.
Before coming across Percy’s words, I had spent years being interrogated by people in positions of power about my own freezing after sexual assault. Because of these authority figures and their questions, I had internalized a deep sense of shame about why I had remained immobile. Afterwards, their questions echoed in my head, haunting me. I was unable to let go of that shame.
But Percy’s article, with its thorough research and interviews, presented an alternative authoritative reality. I started to believe that I need only look at the natural world, where animals play dead to survive, to accept that freezing might be the most frequent physiological response to sexual violence.
Percy’s new book, Girls Play Dead: Acts of Preservation, expands on the article to map a complete landscape of freezing and its afterlife. She collects stories about freezing as a way to first understand and normalize the responses of victims, then herself. What emerges is a deeply humbling and revelatory reading experience. Percy’s reporting reminds us that we are mere animals, and that the instinct to freeze is deeply ingrained in our bodies.
For years, I held on to shame about my inability to fight or flee. Girls Play Dead helped me realize that my body, frozen, was doing everything it could to keep me alive.
I spoke to Percy over Zoom in early December about using embodied memory to interview victims, what we might learn from animals about shame, and the many surprising forms of freezing.
The Rumpus: You start the book by saying, “Sometimes the stories of strangers in books can help us feel less alone, less strange. So I started collecting these stories.” When did you first start collecting stories? What led you to them?
Jen Percy: I had started watching videos online of animals playing dead, of their “tonic immobility.” I had also looked at responses to violence in many contexts as part of my reporting around war.
Then, for one of my projects for The New York Times, I looked at the language that sexual assault victims used to talk about their experiences. I wanted to ask, “How do we describe ourselves in moments of distress?” I went to look at newspaper reports of victims describing their own experiences. They often used the word “frozen” or “freezing,” but all of them were describing different things.
There were so many different kinds of freezing, whether it was intentional freezing to get out of a situation more quickly, or whether it was more of an involuntary response.
I wanted to refine the language, to see if there were more nuanced words that experts were using. I started to ask questions about freezing responses to make sense of not only my own experiences, but stories friends had told me, or things I read on the news. It was a vast collection of people that I was trying to understand.
Rumpus: Immediately, you write about four generations of women and their responses to violence. Your mother was a naturalist who taught you how to play dead, who had suffered her own sexual assaults. Your grandmother joined a cult led by a woman, and your great-grandmother had an abusive husband. What did putting all four generations on the page illuminate about your own experiences?
Percy: Even though I structured the book that way, it was actually written in reverse. I did the reporting first, and then I went and I wrote the personal sections. I had written some of my personal experiences beforehand, but the problem was I didn’t quite know how to make sense of it or narrativize it.
Then I found that the way women in my family talked about giving up power to men felt like ventriloquism, or a magical confusion. That’s what I received, in story form.
I didn’t really understand how to make sense of that until I had all of the reporting done. After the reporting, I realized that my family members’ responses had been fear and trauma responses. Much of it had been involuntary, but some of it had been just smart survival responses.
That’s when I went back and looked through these generations of women and how I had inherited their stories. I’d accepted those stories and was imitating those responses because I didn’t know differently.
Rumpus: The book is about storytelling around trauma and how fragmented it can be. You write in kaleidoscopic fragments that bring in a chorus of women’s voices. How does the content of the book mirror the form?
Percy: I think that whenever the content of a book mirrors the form, it makes the book stronger. Of course, when the content is trauma, you always run the risk of losing the reader to the confusing aspects of storytelling that trauma produces. I had to be a little bit careful with that.
But first of all, I think that having a chorus of women was really important. To have an onslaught of voices that had to say, “This is happening. This is true. There’s no way around it.”
Even the #MeToo movement was an onslaught of voices. When women speak, often people will dismiss it if it’s just one story. But then, if 10 or 20 others come out and start speaking, there is a power to those numbers.
If I had decided to write five in-depth profiles for the book, that wouldn’t have felt like enough. I really wanted the book to show that freezing is everywhere. I didn’t want someone to read this and say, “Oh, it was just this one person having this rare experience of freezing.”
Writing a sociology, an ethnography, a history of this overlooked aspect of sexual violence and giving victims that power to tell their stories felt really important to me.
Rumpus: You allow your stories to flow between the women’s stories and yours. What was that process like?
Percy: I tried to move organically and associatively as I built the book. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know there were responses that would be interesting to write about other than freezing.
But first, I wrote about freezing, and then took notes as I was interviewing women about things they mentioned, these very interesting responses to trauma, that I felt like no one had been talking about.
Most women didn’t have just one response in isolation. They would talk about multiple things. So I would go back to a woman and talk about something else they’d brought up that interested me, and that would become the next chapter.
I kept going that way. I didn’t have everything lined up in a thesis. But that made me realize that the book felt even more urgent. So many of these responses are still extremely obscure in society. It wasn’t like I could go Google search what I was curious about and find a list of common responses.
I felt like this was an appropriate way to approach writing about freezing. It was not a great way to write a proposal or a pitch because everything I was writing about was mostly unknown. But my editor had a lot of faith in the essayistic form, knowing that historically this research, on the psychological aftermath of sexual violence and what it looks like to experience that kind of trauma in the moment, had not been discussed.
Rumpus: The phrase “fight or flight” is so embedded in our culture. But by exploring “freezing,” you challenge how victims respond in ways we don’t traditionally expect. You speak to some subjects whose minds float out of their bodies to escape when they freeze. And then years later, their bodies might start having seizures. Did you think about how these stories were disrupting this construct that we have of “fight or flight,” to add new ways to think about “freezing?”
Percy: I think that those terms are so embedded in our culture that it’s going to be hard to undo them. But even putting pressure on “freezing” opened up this almost 250-page book of nuance about that response alone. You don’t think that term could mean so much.
I ordered this book in a very particular way. I think that starting with the freezing was important. and then I moved on to more abstract, or more metaphorical forms of freezing.
Then, we see moments of fight or flight. We have women fighting back against men to protect themselves and then inadvertently killing them, and then ending up in jail or prison, in a frozen state. Their stories are frozen. No matter what, even if we bring the stories back to life, they’re ignored. They’re inert.
I wanted to shake up the idea of a neat progression, too. It’s not necessarily that you freeze once and then you’re done. We can freeze and unfreeze our whole lives, and we can become animated and fight and then go back into a frozen state.
I think there is a resistance to talking about freezing because no one wants to think about freezing as a response to fear. It’s so uncomfortable. I don’t want to think about myself freezing when I think about someone attacking me. It doesn’t seem like the natural response, even though it is.
Then there’s a huge thread of the rejection of freezing that is grounded in misogyny. It benefits men to have this precedent of resistance, of fighting. Because if they make fighting the primary form of evidence for when people have not consented, then it makes it easier for men to get off without any legal consequence, because most people freeze.
Rumpus: Like you said, the book opens up into more abstract, philosophical questions. You visit a women’s prison where you have to deal with questions around the futility of storytelling. These women who have killed their abusers are telling you, “We already told our stories, but nothing’s happened.” What was it like to grapple with the fact that racism, patriarchy, the carceral system, is so insurmountable that these stories might not make a difference?
Percy: That was a hard moment to come to. But I think it’s interesting, and good, if a writer can undercut some of their own arguments.
I was building towards this argument: if only we understood how trauma influences women’s storytelling, we would believe them. We just need to educate people.
And then, I find out that these women have been telling their stories for five years, working with a lawyer for re-sentencing hearings, and the judge says, “I believe you, and it doesn’t matter. I’m not changing your sentence.”
These women were all African American, women from poor backgrounds, and they unfortunately were not treated the way a wealthier white woman would be treated in that context. The intersection of these topics with racism, poverty, socioeconomic status, can’t be ignored either. I kept trying to make the book more intersectional and complicate some of the storytelling.
Rumpus: You attend a training in Virginia where law enforcement officials talk about interviewing victims multiple times to draw a map of what happened, because the way that victims remember traumatic incidents is not linear, can be muddled, and unexpected. How did you interview women for this book? Did you have to interview some of them over and over, before a fuller story might emerge?
Percy: It was really valuable to attend the training session with police and prosecutors on trauma-informed interviewing. I did steal some things from them. The most important thing I learned, which is important for everyone to understand if you’re talking to someone who’s experienced trauma, is that fear or trauma isn’t witnessed, it’s experienced.
We have to ask people questions about experience and sensory details. It gives a much more accurate and interesting portrait. My goal was to ask, “What is it like to have this happen to you? What did it feel like?”
The other thing was to give people as much control as possible when they were telling their story. Often, my best interviews were actually when the person I was interviewing talked the entire time, and I didn’t have to ask that many questions. That first question would be, “What’s your story? Start wherever you want and keep going.” There would be a lot of information coming at me, then I would go back and follow up. But I let them build the story that way. Sometimes it was confusing to piece it back together, but it often created a very colorful and more psychologically accurate, nuanced story that felt more comparable to a novel or a short story.
I think that people are actually really good at telling their stories when they’re given the power to tell it from their perspective without forcing them into a box. I wanted to create an open space. It led down some interesting avenues and it allowed them to talk about hallucinations and dreams, to be comfortable talking about the things that they might think were weird.
I wanted to invite all that in. In a sterile environment, like a police interview, you wouldn’t be able to get the same stories. Victims might feel embarrassed, like their stories don’t fit anything that looks like a story a victim would tell. It felt really good to open up a space where they could say whatever they wanted.
Rumpus: What was it like to focus on embodied, sensory memory? How did you bring that to the page, whether you were writing about your own experiences or others?
Percy: There’s always some way that the body is brought into conversations and significantly changed after an experience of sexual violence. The body has a different way of being in the world after those experiences, because it’s still trying to protect itself. When our language might fail us, or our memory might fail us, the body is doing a lot of work.
Even without asking, a lot of people would often go to the body. They would say, “I tried to disappear from my body or escape from my body or use my body as if it were a tool to dominate others or to destroy myself.”
I thought that the post-trauma seizures were the most drastic form of a body trying to speak. The women I talked to believed their body was trying to tell them something that had been ignored by doctors or friends or society. It was this energy release, a way of fighting when they were frozen.
I do feel like society still punishes women for speaking or writing about the body. I was trying to make my reporting very grounded in science and grounded in these women’s bodily experiences, without having to over-justify it.
Rumpus: One thing that I really appreciated in the book was how you wove in the natural world and this constant reminder that we humans are mere animals, and that our bodies are just returning to our basic, most primal instincts to survive. That was really humbling to think, “This is just what any animal does.” Did you find yourself returning to your childhood and your mother’s work as a naturalist?
Percy: Growing up in the wilderness shapes everything I do. I always look at the world with that lens; it’s such a big part of my life.
It became an important part of this book because there’s a really interesting, controversial relationship between women and wildness. Our wildness has been used against us, but the wildness is embraced by women as a form of protest or revolution. There’s also a wildness when our bodies actually respond to fear. Historically, men have tried to repress it or made us feel guilty about our wildness.
But in the natural world, after freezing, animals spring back to life and are healthy again because they don’t have shame towards their responses. That’s the interesting disconnect between fear in the animal world and in our world. Evolutionarily, the brain’s responding to fear in the same way, but humans have this shame about our response of freezing.
Every chapter in the book shows that shame. Whether it’s panic attacks and just feeling so embarrassed for how our body is responding, I explore that shame.
We’ve placed so much emphasis on animal studies and how they play dead. We’ve been studying these responses in animals for years, but we’ve just ignored women, you know?
