Reckoning

October 28, 2022

The pandemic "stopped time and expanded it" for author V, formerly Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), and gave her the opportunity to trace her obsessions and curiosities into a book of reckoning. The result is a compassionate collection of 45 essays, sermons, speeches, and poems detailing the Tony Award-winning playwright and activist's thoughts about everything from AIDS to access to abortion. The works are separated into themes, such as Mother Hunger, Femicide, and Grief, and surrounded by an introduction on lifesaving writing and an epilogue explaining V's chosen name. As a five-year-old child named Eve, she was molested and abused by her father. Throughout this collection, V shows the impact of that pain on her relationships with her mother, who did not acknowledge the abuse until later, and her connections with women throughout the world who are victims of sexual terrorism, live in poverty, and are denied access to quality medical care. Political opinions are prevalent, especially related to the patriarchy in government and its impact on women. VERDICT This is a fierce and empathetic look at the world and its many struggles.--Joyce Sparrow

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Starred review from November 7, 2022
This bracing career-spanning collection from playwright V (The Apology) gives readers unprecedent access to her life, work, and the underpinnings of her worldview. V details how writing The Apology, an imagined narrative of her father atoning for his sexual and physical abuse of her, ultimately set her free: “He owned his terrible deeds, he felt my pain, he evidenced awareness and remorse.” V’s strongest work from the Guardian is reprinted here: “Disaster Patriarchy” argued that Covid-19 “unleashed the most severe setback to women’s liberation” by allowing men to “exploit a crisis to reassert control and dominance”; and in a contribution to the paper’s Living in a Woman’s Body series, she wrote about how her own body “was a conquered land... pillaged and vanquished from the very start.” Other pieces—which discuss such topics as Donald Trump, femicide in the Congo, and rape as a weapon of war—shed light on global horrors. In the final chapter, she explains why she changed her name: “V is the name of my real people and reminder of my true origins.” V’s explosive truth-telling is as provocative as it is intense. The result is a raw and relevant oeuvre. Agent: Charlotte Sheedy, Charlotte Sheedy Literary.

December 1, 2022
A celebrated feminist playwright grapples with the personal traumas that inspired her to become an activist. In her latest book, V--formerly Eve Ensler (b. 1953)--gathers journal entries, poems, essays, and articles penned over the last 45 years to understand her journey from the young woman she was to the person she became. The author begins this eclectic collection with a childhood memory of her father slapping her in the face. The moment was transformative: From then on, she "had to pretend to be someone else in order to survive," a situation that made her feel like a "prisoner." The "walls" of trauma that surrounded her came to symbolize the challenges she struggled to overcome as an adult through addictions to alcohol, drugs, and sex. Working as a volunteer in New York City women's shelters and jails helped V rechannel self-destructive impulses toward more positive ends. Words--which she calls her "friends" and the source of her power--became another portal to liberation. Through writing, she was able to explore the wounds and complex emotions that emerged in the years after her father's sexual abuse while documenting the social, political, and economic suffering of women in Europe, Africa, and Asia. As she confronted the destruction wrought by toxic masculinity on so many levels, V began to see how it was tied to the brutal, hyperexploitative system of global capitalism and understand that all forms of injustice--including racism--were connected to female oppression. "There is no hierarchy of suffering," writes the author, "only the joining into a single river of outrage, compassion and revolt." Deeply felt, thoughtful, and lyrical, the narrative offers a reflection on the connectedness of the personal and political and the need for all humanity to reckon fully with its past in pursuit of a more just world. An elegant and timely book.

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Starred review from November 1, 2022
When COVID-19 halted her life of constant motion and collaboration as a profoundly influential playwright, writer, and global activist, V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, took the opportunity to delve into 45 years worth of her journals, poems, monologues, and essays to assemble this riveting collection. Writing, V tells readers, is how she survives trauma, from the sexual violence of her childhood, which she courageously explores in The Apology (2019), to her bearing witness as she speaks with women who endured rape and other torture during the Bosnian War, in the Congo, and under ISIS. Never looking away, always practicing "the high arts of listening and empathy," V digs deep to find the words to constructively address sexual atrocities and everyday sexism and their insidious consequences. A frank and precise journalist and creative, visionary, and heroic writer of conscience and action, she asks crucial questions about the failures of society to care for people who are "wounded or poor or mentally ill or unhoused," and traces the links between social cruelty and environmental destruction. In the most recent pieces, she explains why V is her "freedom name," marks the ways the pandemic has caused "an explosion of violence toward women" and severe erosion of women's liberation, and urges us to stand up for our rights and a saner, kinder, and more nurturing way of life.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This far-reaching, deeply affecting collection will garner avid attention and ignite passionate discussion.

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