Reckoning
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Memoir of the Season
The work of a lifetime from the Tony Award-winning, bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues-political, personal, profound, and more than forty years in the making.
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, to 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
