A ceaseless monologue

Eve Ensler, now known as ‘V’, has swept a career’s worth of feminist activism into one impassioned but messy book

RECKONING by V 272pp, Bloomsbury, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£16.99, ebook £11.89

Eve Ensler, the Vagina Monologues writer who now goes by the mononym “V”, is a tornado of a woman. She has been a magnificent activist for women’s rights all over the world: she never seems to stop moving.

The New York native is now 70 years old, and Reckoning is put together from 45 years of work. There are speeches, essays, poems and letters in this book, all wrestling with injustices that she has suffered, or suffering she has witnessed. Her material is endless and relentless. V says that writing is always a form of failing, but she doesn’t flinch: she’s going to keep documenting abuse, delving into what disturbs us.

We’re told about nine-year-old girls being raped in the Congo and all the women who leak urine and faeces because of horrific internal injuries. We hear from women in Croatia raped during the Bosnian War. There’s a letter from refugees on Manus Island, 600 people asking the Australian government to kill them because their lives in that limbo aren’t worth living. And we hear a lot about the sexual and physical abuse V went through from the age of five at the hands of her own father.

If this all sounds dark and heavy – well, it is. Reading Reckoning in one hit, one feels punched in the gut, until a kind of numbness takes over. It’s as if V were writing to us from the heart of the storm, the trauma that she’s always trying to process. How she processes it is through her activism, through her plays and her sermons – and much of this writing would be better performed than read. On the page, her undoubted passion tends to be one-note, without modulation.

Everything is awful and everything is connected: climate activism, colonialism, greed, violence, homelessness, abortion rights, disinformation.

Hence you get sentences such as this about the sacrifice of women during Covid: “The shattered veins of racist patriarchal capitalism were bleeding everywhere.” At its best, this overwrought style can evoke the passionate intensity of a great writer such as Andrea Dworkin. Sometimes, however, it’s just too much.

Yet V knows this about herself, that she’s overdramatic and excessive – she considers it her gift. And there are great moments, too.

She’s a brilliant witness when writing of the losses of the Aids epidemic, or of being with a Holocaust survivor who returns to the camp in which she was imprisoned, and discovers the freedom to take back her own story.

In particular, V writes joyously about sex. One central theme of Reckoning is the female body and women’s physicality: she’s probably best known for The Vagina Monologues, written in 1996 and performed in more than 140 countries – often by celebrities. For me, at the time, this consciousness-raising exercise in getting women to speak about such a taboo subject – their own genitals – felt as though it belonged to a previous era; but I was wrong, and it proved wildly successful and liberating. As time went on, however, the play came under critical fire for being full of white privilege, and inconsiderate of transgender people. By the 2010s, American universities had decided that having a vagina wasn’t an accurate description of being a woman. Gender, in this way of thinking, wasn’t to do with biology or anatomy.

I mention this because V, as seemingly all American feminists do today, bows down in Reckoning to these ideas. When she uses the word “woman”, she says, “I mean for it to be expansive and inclusive”. She starts one letter “Dear White Women”, when she is a white woman. This stuff either floats your boat or doesn’t.

She’s at her most lucid when she talks about her own reckoning with her abuse: her knowledge feels hard-won. Her ideas on apology and forgiveness as a practice, as something that needs to be taught, is a message the world needs to hear.

Without a doubt, V’s political activism has been transformative. But while these fragments of writing from a survivor are full of raw power, they somehow, in the end, fail to do justice to that work. Her reckoning seems bound to theatre, to performance.

Hers is a clarion call that is better experienced in the flesh – the flesh that V has spent a lifetime reclaiming.

She knows her style is overly dramatic – but she considers it her gift

j Always active: the playwright, essayist and activist Eve Ensler