HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Henry Holt, Metropolitan Books ...

Metropolitan Books
Eve Ensler
IN THE BODY OF THE WORLD
Publication: April 2013 Manuscript available
Editor: Sara Bershtel
Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to thinking about the female body—
how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet as she recounts in this inspiring and lyrical
memoir, she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection first brought
on by her father’s battering and sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness, and by her later exploits
with drugs, alcohol, and promiscuous sex. Her body was a machine to be mastered; she lived in her
head, estranged from her physical self and from nature. “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. On a trip to 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 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, at once intensely physical and profoundly spiritual, Ensler’s transformative work calls
on us all at last to embody our elemental connection to and responsibility for the world.
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 I Am An Emotional Creature (2010) which was a NYT
bestseller. 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.
British: Henry Holt
Translation: Henry Holt
Rights sold, I Am an Emotional Creature: Bulgarian/Soft Press, Czech/Prah s.r.o., French/10/18,
Hungarian/Nyitott Konyvmuhely, Korean/Minumin, Italian/Edizioni Piemme,
Portuguese/Publicacoes Europa-America, Slovack/Gnostica d.o.o, Spanish/Editorial Oceano,
Russian/Centrepolygraph, Turkish/Inkilap Kitavevi