From the bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues and one of Newsweek's 150 Women Who Changed the World, a visionary memoir of separation and connection--to the body, the self and the world. 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 has 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 the 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. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and though 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.
Reviews and Endorsements:
“A one-of-a-kind cancer memoir.... In the Body of the World is reminiscent of two other books by internationally bestselling American female authors—Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.... A new classic on the inspirational spectrum.”
—The Gazette
“Ensler’s fight with cancer is detailed with breathtaking candour in her new book In the Body of the World. More than a cancer memoir, it’s a call to action: for readers to connect to their own bodies, and to do something for the world—before it’s too late (for us as individual humans, and for humanity)…. Even if she emerged healthy and changed for the better, Ensler does not whitewash the hell of cancer. She details the most invasive of procedures and does not shy away from the most personal of details.”
—Marsha Lederman, The Globe and Mail About the Author:
EVE ENSLER is an internationally bestselling author and an acclaimed playwright whose works for the stage include The Vagina Monologues, Necessary Targets, and The Good Body. She is the author of Insecure at Last, a political memoir, and the New York Times bestseller, I Am An Emotional Creature. Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls which has raised more than $85 million since 1989. Eve Ensler lives in Paris and New York City.
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