In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection

(Paperback)

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I have been exiled from my body. I was ejected at a very young age and I got lost.

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 many years disassociated from her own - a disconnection brought on by her father's sexual abuse and her mother's remoteness.

While working in the Congo, Ensler 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 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

A masterpiece ... Truly one of the most courageous and original works of our time - Naomi Klein

The passion of her writing rattles your soul. This is true literature and true activism - Isabel Allende

Raw and powerful ... unforgettable - New York Times

Inspiring and courageously candid ... a powerful and profound book - Huffington Post

Extraordinary ... necessary ... an intense, riveting memoir - Boston Globe

Author Bio

Eve Ensler is a playwright, performer and activist. She is the award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, which has been translated into forty-five languages and performed in over one hundred countries. Eve is also the founder/artistic director of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over $100 million in nineteen years. She is the recipient of many awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Playwriting, and has received numerous honorary degrees.