Reckoning

V, 1953-

Book - 2023

"The newest book from V (formerly Eve Ensler), Reckoning invites you to travel the journey of a writer's and activist's life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. Seamlessly moving from the internal to the external, the personal to the political, Reckoning is a moving and inspiring work of prose, poetry, dreams, letters, and essays drawn from V's lifelong journals that takes readers from Berlin to Oklahoma to the Congo, from climate disaster, homelessness, and activism to family. Unflinching, intimate, introspective, courageous, Reckoning explores ways to create an unstoppable force for change, t...o love and survive love, to hold people and states accountable, to reckon with demons and honor the dead, to reclaim the body, and to see oneself as connected to a greater purpose. It reimagines what seems fixed and intractable, providing a path to understand one's unique experience as deeply rooted in the world, to break through one's own boundaries, and to write oneself into freedom."--Amazon.

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Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Published
New York, NY : Bloomsbury Publishing 2023.
Language
English
Main Author
V, 1953- (author)
Physical Description
xxii, 244 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781635579048
  • Introduction
  • Words Were Burning
  • I. Walls
  • Make Love Not Wall
  • Ladies
  • I Was a Funny Person Once
  • 600
  • II. Aids
  • Terrorist Angel
  • All of Us Are Leaving
  • Extraordinary Measures
  • Paul
  • Paul
  • For Richard
  • III. Mother Hunger
  • Dear Mother
  • My Mother Was Not My Mother
  • How Fragile
  • The Whole World Is Raining
  • Battered Baby
  • Dear White Women
  • IV. Femicide
  • Rachel's Bed
  • Women Left for Dead and the Man Who's Saving Them
  • Baptized
  • The Bureau of Sex Slavery
  • Disaster Patriarchy
  • Freeing the Birdsong
  • V. Grief
  • Folding
  • Theresienstadt
  • Where All the Grief
  • VI. Falling
  • How do you live on the edge of what's over?
  • After the fires
  • Dear Mother (Earth)
  • Cicadas
  • VII. Skin
  • Here's How We Like It
  • All Snap in My Jaw
  • The War Has Begun
  • It Will All Go Like This
  • Sometimes It's So Can't Stop
  • Who Will We Become Without Touch?
  • VIII. Reckoning
  • Let Him Be Our Unifier
  • Keep Us Fed
  • The Alchemy of Apology
  • Finding Your Place
  • Roses the Size of Teacup Saucers
  • To All Those Who Dare Rob Us of Our Bodily Choice
  • Eve's Revolution
  • "Becoming Part of That Suffering and Dancing Country"
  • Disruption
  • "Is This the Moment?"
  • Then We Were Jumping
  • Epilogue
  • V: A Dream Vision of My New Name
  • Acknowledgments
  • Credits
Review by Booklist Review

When COVID-19 halted her life of constant motion and collaboration as a profoundly influential playwright, writer, and global activist, V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, took the opportunity to delve into 45 years worth of her journals, poems, monologues, and essays to assemble this riveting collection. Writing, V tells readers, is how she survives trauma, from the sexual violence of her childhood, which she courageously explores in The Apology (2019), to her bearing witness as she speaks with women who endured rape and other torture during the Bosnian War, in the Congo, and under ISIS. Never looking away, always practicing "the high arts of listening and empathy," V digs deep to find the words to constructively address sexual atrocities and everyday sexism and their insidious consequences. A frank and precise journalist and creative, visionary, and heroic writer of conscience and action, she asks crucial questions about the failures of society to care for people who are "wounded or poor or mentally ill or unhoused," and traces the links between social cruelty and environmental destruction. In the most recent pieces, she explains why V is her "freedom name," marks the ways the pandemic has caused "an explosion of violence toward women" and severe erosion of women's liberation, and urges us to stand up for our rights and a saner, kinder, and more nurturing way of life.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This far-reaching, deeply affecting collection will garner avid attention and ignite passionate discussion.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This bracing career-spanning collection from playwright V (The Apology) gives readers unprecedent access to her life, work, and the underpinnings of her worldview. V details how writing The Apology, an imagined narrative of her father atoning for his sexual and physical abuse of her, ultimately set her free: "He owned his terrible deeds, he felt my pain, he evidenced awareness and remorse." V's strongest work from the Guardian is reprinted here: "Disaster Patriarchy" argued that Covid-19 "unleashed the most severe setback to women's liberation" by allowing men to "exploit a crisis to reassert control and dominance"; and in a contribution to the paper's Living in a Woman's Body series, she wrote about how her own body "was a conquered land... pillaged and vanquished from the very start." Other pieces--which discuss such topics as Donald Trump, femicide in the Congo, and rape as a weapon of war--shed light on global horrors. In the final chapter, she explains why she changed her name: "V is the name of my real people and reminder of my true origins." V's explosive truth-telling is as provocative as it is intense. The result is a raw and relevant oeuvre. Agent: Charlotte Sheedy, Charlotte Sheedy Literary. (Jan.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A celebrated feminist playwright grapples with the personal traumas that inspired her to become an activist. In her latest book, V--formerly Eve Ensler (b. 1953)--gathers journal entries, poems, essays, and articles penned over the last 45 years to understand her journey from the young woman she was to the person she became. The author begins this eclectic collection with a childhood memory of her father slapping her in the face. The moment was transformative: From then on, she "had to pretend to be someone else in order to survive," a situation that made her feel like a "prisoner." The "walls" of trauma that surrounded her came to symbolize the challenges she struggled to overcome as an adult through addictions to alcohol, drugs, and sex. Working as a volunteer in New York City women's shelters and jails helped V rechannel self-destructive impulses toward more positive ends. Words--which she calls her "friends" and the source of her power--became another portal to liberation. Through writing, she was able to explore the wounds and complex emotions that emerged in the years after her father's sexual abuse while documenting the social, political, and economic suffering of women in Europe, Africa, and Asia. As she confronted the destruction wrought by toxic masculinity on so many levels, V began to see how it was tied to the brutal, hyperexploitative system of global capitalism and understand that all forms of injustice--including racism--were connected to female oppression. "There is no hierarchy of suffering," writes the author, "only the joining into a single river of outrage, compassion and revolt." Deeply felt, thoughtful, and lyrical, the narrative offers a reflection on the connectedness of the personal and political and the need for all humanity to reckon fully with its past in pursuit of a more just world. An elegant and timely book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.