Brooklyn Bookbeat: ‘Vagina Monologues’ playwright to release memoir
Eve Ensler has devoted her life to enlightening the world about the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet, she spent much of life disassociated from her own body, a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. Now, Eve shares her story for the first time in a poignant memoir, “In The Body of the World” (Metropolitan Books / On Sale: April 30, 2013).
While working in the Congo, Eve is shocked out of her distance—shattered by her encounter with the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and during months of harrowing treatment she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all the distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the Earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully—and gratefully—joined to the body of the world.
Unflinching, generous, and inspiring, “In The Body of the World” is a transformative work that calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.