An Extraordinary conversation with Jen Percy

For everyone who has been impacted by violence

I have loved Jen Percy ever since Demon Camp, which had been sent to me by the Nervous Breakdown Book Club years ago. When I heard that Double Day was publishing a book about responses, regular and atypical, to intimate partner violence, I knew I needed to speak to her for INTERVIEW mag. I am begging every person here to read this whole interview, click through, and share the article. The information that Percy elucidates and articulates has the power to open up a claustrophobic and shame-inducing conversation into a wide field of possibility. Please give this very personal and exciting conversation a read, and then let me know what you think in the comments, DMs, whatever feels necessary. This book blew me awake after the post-me-too dormancy and depression of inaction within our world. After you read the article, definitely get the book.

Here’s the beginning:

Kyle Dillon Hertz: After my ex-boyfriend strangled me, the detective questioned me about my physical response to the attack. I had been thrown to the ground, beaten, and strangled. I imagined I was the type of person who would fight, but I didn’t. I was scabbed for weeks. I pissed blood. And each time he became physical, I froze. After my ex-boyfriend’s arrest, having already ceded entire swaths of Brooklyn to him, I dropped the case because I didn’t want to see him ever again.

This is why I wanted so badly to talk to Jen Percy about Girls Play Dead, her extraordinary exploration into the psychological and physical responses to sexual assault, including tonic immobility—freezing, playing dead—and psychogenic seizures, during which victims look almost as if they’re fighting off attackers. The book, out last week, is heartbreaking, filled with liberating accounts of the varied responses to violence, and it cracked open chambers of my hardened heart. Moreover, Percy’s ability to condense and explain traumatic reactions in conversation shows how much of the subject remains woefully underexplored. She is a necessary source of clarity and expansion in a claustrophobic, murky world. Earlier this month, it was an honor to speak with her.

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KYLE DILLON HERTZ: Hey Jen, it’s great to talk to you.

JEN PERCY: Hi, thanks for taking the time.

HERTZ: Ever since I first saw this book, I was looking forward to reading it, which seems kind of ironic to some people. So much of what could be considered great or popular writing is about escape. But I had this one experience which really transformed my life. When I was younger, I was sexually abused. I felt such incredible shame. And for years, until I read your book, I almost didn’t investigate it. Reading Girls Play Dead is an investigation into all the different responses to assault, but one of the very specific ones you bring up is this idea of tonic immobility. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about tonic immobility and how you became interested in it.

PERCY: Thank you so much for sharing that story. It’s interesting because that really is where the book started, and it actually began with this image of animals playing dead. I was watching videos of a couple of birds, a toad, and a possum—just a YouTube video, getting obsessed with it. It made me Google whether humans do it or not. It turns out that was true, and then I went really deep into the research and ended up landing on Jessica Mann’s testimony in the Weinstein case about tonic immobility. So that’s kind of how I got to that phrase. At first, I was just looking at the phrase “playing dead,” which is the colloquial term, but it’s actually much more nuanced and complicated than that. It’s not even playing dead—it can be a range of responses, some of which are voluntary, to help keep ourselves alive and lessen the threat of an attack. But sometimes it’s involuntary, and it can create a state that I didn’t even know existed. You can’t move any of your muscles, you can’t speak. I mean, it doesn’t even sound real. I was shocked no one was talking about it, and yet women researchers had been trying to get it out as early as the 1970s. So that kind of became the gravitational center of my book: this image of animals and people playing dead, and then it evolved into different forms with each chapter as you go through the book.

HERTZ: One part of the book even goes into the origins of thanatosis. You go back to Ovid. Were you attempting to investigate how far back it went?

PERCY: It would be possible to look at the entire history of freezing, but I wanted to give an overview—not only of how it’s evolved and changed, but how patriarchy has shaped that term and how we look at it. In the book I start with magicians, hypnosis, and mesmerism. It was this magical thing that could happen, but it was creating situations where women were vulnerable and prone to hypnosis—especially by this guy [Franz] Mesmer, who went to Europe and started hypnotizing women to cure them of ailments and ended up creating situations that made them prone to sexual assault. I looked at slavery too, because I knew there was a lot of rape going on then, and I was curious to see some of those testimonies. A lot of women talked about freezing during slavery and Reconstruction and in white mob attacks. But of course, it was also a way to keep them safe. “I just had to give myself up”—they were talking about it in a way that was still trying to explain this need to defend themselves. It was, I think, a very dangerous vocabulary to engage with, because any use of words that might suggest complicity could get you called a “whore” or a “slut.”

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