While interviewing sexual assault survivors for her study Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation, Jen Percy began by asking: What did you do immediately after your rape? One woman Percy spoke to prepared chicken soup for her assailant; another “had a bath and watched television with [her] family”; still others comforted or cuddled their violators, fell asleep in the beds where the rapes took place, or pretended, for the sake of their rapists, that the rapists themselves were the proper victims of these events. “I told him I couldn’t wait to do it again,” one confessed. Tidying and accommodating, soothing and self-abnegating—the disquieting scenes of horror’s aftermath.

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.

These weren’t, perhaps, “normal” reactions, but what is normal about being raped—except that it is horrifyingly and statistically commonplace? In the United States, someone is sexually assaulted every 74 seconds; a rape is reported every 4.1 minutes. That some communities and demographics are disproportionately affected by this violence is inarguable, but the notion that rape itself is an exceptional or anomalous injury is a myth. These experiences are, Percy writes, a kind of asphyxiating “accumulation” in the lives of countless girls and women. Rape may come to annihilate the body or fracture the psyche; certainly it disarticulates narrative. Yet the demand on survivors is that we react coherently to violence so shattering it’s often said to be “unspeakable.” To render ourselves credible witnesses, our stories must be lucid; our brokenness must appear in some way familiar.

The demand on survivors is that we react coherently to violence so shattering it’s often said to be “unspeakable.”

It’s easy to believe we’ll know how to act in a disaster, that we have an affinity for survival. Survival, however, wears many faces, and there is much we don’t yet comprehend about women’s responses to sexual violence. As Percy points out, the psychological study of rape trauma is a field “no one in America bothered to study” until the early 1970s. Women’s lib and the consciousness-raising groups of that decade brought many of the hitherto private wounds and pleasures of women’s lives into the light, making the case that our experiences could and should be proper objects of inquiry, and we the subjects staging them. Still, progress has been slow and backsliding frequent. Marital rape, for instance, was largely outlawed in the United States by the 1990s, though legal loopholes exist in several states.

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.

Girls Play Dead opens meditatively on Percy’s girlhood in rural Oregon, where she spent wilderness hikes “mapping the world” and its attendant flora and fauna with her mother, a naturalist.........

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