When the New York Times Magazine contributor and National Magazine Award winner Jen Percy was growing up in rural Oregon, she and her mother went into the woods and practiced playing dead. “My mother ...

In “Girls Play Dead,” Jen Percy examines the ways women respond to sexual trauma. By Jessica Bennett Jessica Bennett is a contributing writer at New York magazine. When you purchase an independently ...

“There is no single anecdote,” Jen Percy writes in the opening sentence of Girls Play Dead, her riveting, heartrending analysis of what sexual assault does to women. “What I’m talking about is an ...