National Magazine Award winner and author of the New York Times Notable Demon Camp, Jen Percy returns with a devastating exploration of womanhood and survival in this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction.
What does it mean to endure as a woman? Percy, who has written extensively on trauma responses and PTSD, revisits these subjects using her personal experience, including sexual assault, to examine a broader social and cultural history of trauma. Beginning with her childhood in rural Oregon, Percy dissects the moments that shaped her girlhood. She learns from her mother, who teaches her wilderness survival strategies (and who eventually joins a cult), and she interrogates the biological basis for "freezing," or tonic immobility, that is instinctual for humans in moments of physical danger. Percy's writing chronicles women venturing into fantasies, cults, and hypnosis in order to cope with suffering and abuse.
This is a book about women forced to play dead, and others fighting for their lives. It follows women in bunkers preparing for the apocalypse when the apocalypse might be embodied by the person darkening their door and women imprisoned for killing their attackers, all in an effort to better understand how people get stuck in inescapable circumstances-of domestic abuse, sexual assault, and vigilantism. Percy depicts the thrilling grit it takes to escape such evil and overcome moments of paralysis when women are so often conditioned by the myth of "fight or flight."
In electrifying prose, reminiscent of Joan Didion and Robert Kolker, Percy combines personal and cultural history, psychology, and reportage to deliver an astonishing examination of the malignant forces women face in the everyday, and the depths forged by the American character to confront them. One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 JEN PERCY is a contributing writer at the 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 the MacDowell Colony. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Percy has published essays in the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Harper's, BookForum, The New Republic, Esquire, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Columbia University.
