Eve Ensler discusses "In the Body of the World"

This event will take place in Kagin Commons, on the campus of Macalester College. 

From the bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues comes a visionary memoir of separation and connection--to the body, the self, and the world.

Ensler
has written a profound and vulnerable book, full of tenderness and
strength. I was amazed by the clarity of her vision and the power of her
message about the body and self. This book isn't meant only for
patients; it is meant for anyone whose life has intersected with
illness--in short, for all of us."--Siddhartha Mukherjee

"I dare anyone to read In the Body of the World
without crying, without crying out, without getting up and rising to
this beautiful broken world with awe and gratitude. There is no pity
here, only the raw force of courage in the face of fear and violence,
and the healing grace of honesty."--Terry Tempest Williams

"Eve
Ensler incarnates the pain of the women in the Congo, victims of rape
and torture; and of the Earth, victim of so much desecration. Her heart
and body are broken, her anger is like fire, and the passion of her
writing rattles your soul. This is true literature and true
activism."--Isabel Allende

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
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 my body or the Earth," she writes,
"I could not feel or know their pain."

While
working in the Congo, Ensler is shattered to encounter the horrific
rape and violence inflicted on the women there. She is shocked out of
her distance. 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.

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Eve Ensler is a bestselling author and an award-winning playwright whose works include The Vagina Monologues, The Good Body, Insecure at Last, and I Am an Emotional Creature, since adapted for the stage as Emotional Creature.
She is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence
against women and girls, which has raised more than $90 million for
local groups and activists, and inspired the global action One Billion
Rising. Ensler lives in Paris and New York City.