Friday, November 14, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 **A lyrical and groundbreaking exploration of the misunderstood ways women survive and forever carry trauma from the award-winning _New York Times Magazine_ writer Jen Percy.** After a childhood spent learning survival strategies in the wilderness, Jen Percy thought she knew how she would respond in the face of danger. But a series of unsettling interactions with men left her feeling betrayed and confounded by her body's passivity. Forced to reckon the myths of her own empowerment, Percy set off a broader inquiry into the way fear shapes behavior in the context of sexual violence, including the strange behaviors of three generations of women in her family. Drawing on original reporting, years of conversations with survivors, and her own life story, Percy explores the surprising ways in which responses to sexual violence are shaped by both evolutionary instinct and gendered scripts. She takes on taboo subjects—orgasms during assault, sexual promiscuity, female rage, freezing and passivity—illuminating how society misreads these acts as deviance or consent, rather than brilliant acts of self-preservation. Like Joan Didion, Katherine Boo, and Janet Malcolm, Percy is a fearless cultural critic with a talent for wresting deep truths from lived experiences. _Girls Play Dead_ meaningfully expands the language available to survivors and complicates our expectations of how a trauma story should sound—especially when belief, justice, and healing are contingent on how well a story “makes sense.” Percy examines how trauma corrupts storytelling itself, making survivors’ accounts seem fractured or surreal—and therefore less credible to institutions demanding coherence—resulting in an ambitious testament to the mind as a record of resilience. **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 MacDowell. 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. **Merritt Tierce** was born and raised in Texas and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first book, the novel _Love Me Back_ (Doubleday), won a Whiting Award and was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize for debut fiction. She was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” author and received a Rona Jaffe Foundation award. Merritt wrote for the last two seasons of the hit Netflix show Orange is the New Black, and her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and other magazines. She has been an invited fellow at MacDowell, Yaddo, BAU Camargo, Can Cab, Art Omi, and other residencies. She spent ten years working in the abortion rights movement in Texas and now lives in Los Angeles.