Starred review from March 11, 2013
In this extraordinarily riveting, graphic story of survival, Ensler, an accomplished playwright (The Vagina Monologues) and activist in international groups such as V-Day, which works to end violence against women, depicts her shattering battle with uterine cancer. Having felt estranged from her body for a lifetime, and been molested as a girl by her father and enthralled by alcohol and promiscuity early on, Ensler as a playwright was seized with a political awareness of the dire violence committed against women across the globe. At the age of 57, she was blindsided when she discovered that her own health emergency mimicked the ones that women were enduring in the developing countries she had visited: "the cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed... the cancer of buried trauma." Her narrative, she writes, is like a CAT scan, "a roving examinationâcapturing images," recording in minute, raw detail the ordeals she underwent over seven months. These include her crazed, "hysterical" response to the diagnosis and her treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., as well as extensive surgery, chemo, radiation, and caring by a "posse" of companions in misery, like her estranged sister, Lu, and far-flung friends such as Mama C, the head of the City of Joy women's center in the Congo. Her anatomy of the invasion of women's bodies is often difficult to read; the lesson she learns is that in order to heal, she has to submit her body to a renewed source of love and joy.

April 1, 2013
A feminist playwright and activist's riveting account of how uterine cancer helped her "find [her] way back to [her] body, and to the Earth." Incest survivor Ensler had dedicated her life to understanding the experience of living in a female body since she had become so disconnected from her own. In 2007, her professional obsessions eventually led her to the Congo, where "the systematic rape, torture, and destruction of women and girls" in the name of securing mineral wealth was a horrifyingly banal reality. Ensler began working with Congolese women to create a female-centered safe space called City of Joy, only to discover in 2010 that she had uterine cancer. The diagnosis awakened her to the body that until then had only been "an abstraction." Suddenly, doctors were cutting into her flesh to fill it with cancer-fighting drugs and then drain it with bags and catheters. Her body, like the body of the Congolese women she was trying to help, had become a host not just to a literal disease, but also to the metaphoric cancers of cruelty, greed, stress and trauma. Loving friendships with women saved her spirit, while chemotherapy, in tandem with surgery that left her temporarily incontinent, saved her life. In the meantime, the physical transformation brought about by the disease caused Ensler to experience a heightened sense of living and being in a world she had once tried to flee through alcohol, drugs, sex and overwork. Reborn through suffering, she issues a clarion call to women to turn "victimhood to fire...self-hatred to action [and]...self-obsession to service." Fierce, frank, raw and profoundly moving.

Starred review from March 1, 2013
After traveling to 60 countries and talking to women who had experienced violence and suffering, internationally renowned writer and activist Ensler thought she had heard it all, but nothing prepared her for the brutality of the Congo. The prolonged war over copper, gold, and coltanminerals used in computers and cell phoneshas claimed eight million lives and led to the rape and torture of hundreds of thousands of women. Ensler's philanthropic organization, V-Day, was beginning to build an urgently needed women's center there when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. In a series of medical nightmares, she sustains the same harrowing wounds as Congolese women who were gang-raped and is flooded by memories of her father's sexual assaults. As Ensler charts her horrific struggle, she aligns her body with the earth, pairing cancer with the pillaging of the Congo and BP's poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico. As explicit as her blood-and-pain chronicles are, 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: The only salvation is kindness. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A national tour and high-profile promotion campaign will launch this scorching and enlightening memoir by the best-selling author of The Vagina Monologues (1998).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2012

Owing to sexual abuse as a child, the author of The Vagina Monologues initially felt no connection to her own body, which changed when she witnessed mass rape in the Congo.

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