In the margins of my review copy, I scrawled recollections of my own post-traumatic behavior, likewise bizarre: In the summer of 2012, I waited for my rapist’s footsteps to recede and then stood up, cleaned the blood from my forehead, and staggered down the middle of the street more than a mile until a cab stopped. Just before Valentine’s Day of the following year, I asked my next rapist for a ride home. When he dropped me several blocks from my apartment (I assiduously avoided disclosing my exact address), I thanked him for the lift, closed his car door quietly, and went to bed for three days. Two years later, and in a different city, I walked into a police precinct, not to report the gang rape that had just happened, but to ask if the men turned in the pocketbook they’d stolen from my purse. My driver’s license, it occurred to me, was about to expire; how else would I replace it? A group of policemen laughed at me when I entered. I promptly left.
The demand on survivors is that we react coherently to violence so shattering it’s often said to be “unspeakable.”
To release a rape book in our moment of escalating anti-feminist backlash is a daring act. With its chorus of voices, Percy’s book is distinctively anchored in #MeToo—joining together women of disparate circumstance in recognition of shared, systemic subordination. But while some of the most prominent memoirs of the #MeToo era—Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, Christine Blasey Ford’s One Way Back, E. Jean Carroll’s Not My Type—gave a loud, clear voice to the victims of high-profile abuses, Percy is attempting to excavate the aftereffects and reactions that remain quietly hidden or catastrophically misconstrued, and to unravel society’s misreadings of them. Girls Play Dead is, by turns, a memoir, a matrilineage, a survey of sex trauma, an analysis of inculcated female docility, and an assemblage of intimate, individual stories of rape’s most discordant and irreconcilable aftershocks.
Though there are no grizzlies in Oregon, Percy’s mother trains her to play dead—a widely known survival strategy in the event of an attack. “I hated playing dead,” Percy recalls. “I preferred to fight,” to “compete for wildness.” But her mother insisted on perfecting the practice. Her mother’s own girlhood had been defined by painstakingly feminized domesticity: In a house where her brothers “did nothing and were asked to do nothing,” Percy’s mother cooked dinner each night and was expected to scrub the floors until “the pads of her fingers turned smooth.” For a time, Percy’s grandmother left the family to join a cult led by New Age guru Elizabeth Prophet, who told followers that the apocalypse (likely via annihilation by Russian nukes) would happen in March 1990. Percy’s mother fled toward marriage and work in the logging industry, which nearly killed her.
Survival, for women, rarely manifests as unambiguous victory; often it’s little more than a painful negotiation with circumstance. In later encounters with men, Percy finds herself reacting with disorienting non-reactions: She courteously fields pervy phone calls and, while abroad, stumbles into a brief assignation with an ambiguously cruel Spanish man. At a party, as a stranger crushes her into the carpeted floor, she remembers feeling “light, floating, no longer afraid. I heard the sound of the ocean.” A girl who happens on the scene makes a snide remark to Percy; “It was too difficult to explain, I told her. I shrugged and left.” The trouble of women’s passivity in facing imminent or transpiring violence—and the shame that subsequently affixes itself to this enervation—are the fulcrum of Girls Play Dead, which is preoccupied with the mystifying expanse between anticipated and actual responses.
When storytelling breaks down or we are otherwise silenced, how do women’s bodies speak? The middle sequence of Girls Play Dead is divided into a kind of taxonomy of these accounts, sorted by an array of post-traumatic responses: agoraphobia, tonic immobility (freezing in the event), psychosomatic seizures, dissociation and feelings of unreality, and dysregulated models of intimacy, including hypersexuality and love addiction.
In other stories, women recall having sex with men simply because there was a “possibility of violence.” A college freshman told sociologist Jessie Ford that she understood these encounters as “consensualish … consensual but unwanted.” Sex meant to please or appease; uncomfortable sex that seemed able to prevent further harm. Percy suggests that the language we have for sexual violence is too circumscribed and determinative, that we need to develop a more complex vocabulary for the feelings of sexual dysphoria that can arise during “embarrassing, disgusting, painful, or creepy sex.”
Mostly successful is Percy’s decision to let the stories breathe, allowing these women to present themselves as entirely, complicatedly human and living expansive lives. We are not, after all, reducible to or ruined by the violence committed against us. At the same time, the book’s tendency toward broad evaluation is also its occasional undoing. That somatic responses are each separated into discrete categories suggests little overlap between them—not taking into account that, say, a survivor of assault might journey from a period of incapacitating antisociality toward one in which they amass frequent and/or novel sexual experiences. Are women who freeze during a rape more likely to suffer seizures in its wake? How does dissociation engineer or reconstruct the routes by which we build physical, sexual, and emotional intimacy with others?
Percy writes that the agoraphobes she interviewed self-induce pain, pinching skin, for example, or snapping rubber bands against their wrists. A defining feature of the phobia is a confusion of bodily borders, between what is in and what is outside of oneself. For them to remain present in their bodies, “it helped to remind themselves that they had one,” Percy writes. Yet I couldn’t help but hear in these descriptions an echo of Percy’s so-called hypersexuals, who have sex sometimes as a way of seeking punishment (“I thought I deserved to be treated like a piece of trash”), but who also, crucially, have sex in order to rewrite the story of their victimization. Some of the women Percy spoke to told her that post-rape sex concerned establishing that “this time it was my choice” or that now “I’m going to decide who gets to touch me.” Three days after an assault, one woman called a friend and asked to be intimate with him “because [she] didn’t want the only experience [she] had of sex to be rape.”
What feels urgent in Percy’s work is her attention to the ways bodies process violence, as well as to the alien, inconsistent nature of many of these responses. Yet Percy is an often distant and disorienting guide through some of the most difficult cases. Her tendency toward disinterested observation and journalistic self-effacement not infrequently registers as evasiveness. Of her approach in Demon Camp, Percy remarked in the Bookforum interview, “I’m a subtle writer when it comes to reflection, and I wish I’d been a little more direct.” At times, this indirectness in Girls Play Dead makes it difficult to see what the stakes are for Percy, or how she’s interpreting the testimonies she collects. The book, in effect, directs the reader toward other sources of authority, citing statistics, police accounts, or psychological professionals over and against some of the women’s own accounts.
Percy’s interviews lead her, also, to a white woman named Chelsea Godfrey, whose rapist—Dajuan Kirksey, who is Black—was convicted and imprisoned for the rape in 2014. In the course of their conversations in late 2022, according to Percy, Godfrey admitted to having lied on the stand: She tells Percy that, though the rape definitively happened, she’d never said “no” during it. She felt she wouldn’t be believed by the jury. (In a December 16, 2024, opinion denying Kirksey’s request to have his conviction vacated, Virginia Circuit Court Judge Brian H. Turpin found that it was “undisputed” that Godfrey had lied about saying “no” and “stop.”) What follows drastically recalibrates Percy’s role in the book, as she shifts from reportorial observation to intervention. A few months later, Percy approached a prosecutor familiar with Godfrey and the case to disclose what Godfrey confessed to her. The Innocence Project subsequently took on Kirksey’s case and in 2024 sought to overturn Kirksey’s conviction on the grounds that Godfrey had lied. That motion was denied, but Kirksey’s appeal is ongoing. At the time of writing, he is still in prison.
It’s true that Kirksey and countless others, particularly people of color, are abused by the justice system. It’s also possible that Godfrey can have said racist things (and did at the time of her testimony: that she would “never have sex with a Black man,” for example) and still have been raped by the man she claimed to have been raped by. Prejudiced people are not immune to sexual violence, and Godfrey—so far as Percy presents this account—is steadfast in her sense that what she experienced was a rape.
While Percy’s husband is right that it was up to the courts to decide what to make of the new evidence Percy found, she gives the reader only a hazy sense of what happened as a result. She describes the subsequent legal maneuverings in confusing and opaque ways; on the emotional fallout, she offers even less. What did all this mean for Godfrey, who believed the case was settled? Or for the man in prison? Who can say? And while Percy highlights Godfrey’s changing story, her reflections on the case omit an important piece of information. She never mentions that Dajuan Kirksey testified at his trial in 2014 that Godfrey did in fact tell him to “stop”; as Judge Turpin noted in his December 2024 opinion, Kirksey told the court that “Ms. Godfrey did tell me to stop and I did stop.”
The episode seems to illustrate, if inadvertently, how easy it is to snap back to typical expectations of rape stories, and how challenging, even for the most informed and well-intentioned observers, to take seriously the possibility that a woman who told a serious lie might also still be telling the truth about her rape. Like Percy, I’m left haunted by the words of a social worker she speaks to at the end of the Godfrey saga: “We think we know these stories because we hear about them in the news.... We don’t know anything.”
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