Eve Ensler is an internationally bestselling author and an award-winning playwright whose works include The Vagina Monologues, The Good Body, Insecure at Last, and I Am an Emotional Creature, since adapted for the stage as Emotional Creature. She is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised more than $90 million for local groups and activists, and inspired the global action One Billion Rising. Ensler lives in Paris and New York City.
Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.”
But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all 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, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.
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Divided
A mother’s body against a child’s body makes a place. It says you are here. Without this body against your body there is no place. I envy people who miss their mother. Or miss a place or know something called home. The absence of a body against my body created a gap, a hole, a hunger. This hunger determined my life.
I have been exiled from my body. I was ejected at a very young age and I got lost. I did not have a baby. I have been afraid of trees. I have felt the Earth as my enemy. I did not live in the forests. I lived in the concrete city where I could not see the sky or sunset or stars. I moved at the pace of engines and it was faster than my own breath. I became a stranger to myself and to the rhythms of the Earth. I aggrandized my alien identity and wore black and felt superior. My body was a burden. I saw it as something that unfortunately had to be maintained. I had little patience for its needs.
“Ensler has written a profound and vulnerable book, full of tenderness and strength. I was amazed by the clarity of her vision and the power of her message about the body and self. This book isn’t meant only for patients; it is meant for anyone whose life has intersected with illness—in short, for all of us.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee
“Astonishing.”
—Mary Oliver
“Eve Ensler incarnates the pain of the women in the Congo, victims of rape and torture; and of the Earth, victim of so much desecration. Her heart and body are broken, her anger is like fire, and the passion of her writing rattles your soul. This is true literature and true activism.”
—Isabel Allende
“Eve Ensler’s memoir is not only wild and raw and incredibly important, it’s also that rarest of achievements—a compulsively readable, stunningly rendered work of art that delivers hope and truth, challenge and solace, sometimes simultaneously.”
—Alexandra Fuller
“A masterpiece. Ensler has accomplished the impossible: woven huge, bold, world-changing ideas together with beautiful writing, amazing metaphors, and original structure. Truly one of the most courageous and original works of our time.”
—Naomi Klein
“This book is a ride, a river ride through rapids and depths and shallows, dried-up eddies, whirlpools and torrents, crystal-clear pools and the vast ocean at the end. What a thrill and what a spear through the heart. I am astounded by the honesty and clarity of each word.”
—Elizabeth Lesser
“I dare anyone to read In the Body of the World without crying, without crying out, without getting up out of their chair and rising to this beautiful broken world with awe and gratitude. Eve Ensler embodies the fierce flame of love on the page and in the world. There is no pity here, only the raw force of courage in the face of fear and violence, and the healing grace of honesty.”
—Terry Tempest Williams
“Ensler’s writing is part rock-and-roll, part sacred text. A shamanistic energy runs through In the Body of the World along with a raw exuberant appetite for life. How can something so searing, strike such a blow for joy? More than a memoir.”
—Ann-Marie MacDonald, internationally bestselling author of Fall on Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies
“Eve Ensler has been such a significant force for such a long time—who’d have thought she’d find a whole new way to use her voice? She is one of the world’s foremost explorers.”
—Emma Forrest, author of Your Voice in My Head
“This is a ravishing book of revelation and healing, lashing truths and deep emotion, courage and perseverance, compassion and generosity. Warm, funny, furious, and astute, as well as poetic, passionate and heroic, Ensler harnesses all that she lost and learned to articulate a galvanizing vision of the essence of life.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Extraordinarily riveting.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Fierce, frank, raw and profoundly moving.”
—Kirkus
