‘Apology’ ends story of abuse
For four months, Eve Ensler was possessed by her late father.
Starting late last summer, he seemed to come alive, speaking to, or through, her, sometimes waking her up at 4 in the morning with a story to tell. “He would talk for a period of hours and then he would stop,” she says. “And then I would almost feel summoned back.”
It all rushed out once the author and Tony Award-winning playwright behind “The Vagina Monologues” decided to take on what would become her latest book, “The Apology.”
“I think I dreamed often in my childhood that my father would apologize to me, and would come and wake up and realize what he had done and see the errors of his ways,” she says. “Then my father died. And secretly, the child part of us yearns for that, yearns to be made whole, yearns to be told the truth.”
So Ensler decided to voice an apology for him.
In “The Apology,” Ensler writes from the perspective of her father in the afterlife, recounting his life and tracing his turbulent relationship with her. The details are often harrowing, as Ensler revisits deep traumas of sexual and physical abuse with an unflinching clarity. “When you have survived abuse or rape or violence of any kind, that person actually makes an imprint on you,” she says. “Their stains are embedded in you. I think my father has always lived inside me, but to give voice to that was a very powerful experience.”
Ensler’s work, of course, has often been marked by vulnerability and taboo subjects, but the device of embodying her father allowed her to go deeper than ever before, she says. In a taut but heartwrenching 128 pages, the book recounts sexual abuse starting from the age of 5 that eventually led to repeated, escalating physical assaults fueled by her father’s increasingly murderous rage.
“I don’t think I ever understood the extent of how battered I was. When I was just going through it again and writing into it, the physical battery of it,” Ensler says, seeming to temper tears over the phone. “It’s so funny how people have a hierarchy of suffering. They think one kind of infliction is worse than another kind of infliction and pain, like sexual violence versus physical violence. I never really gave enough attention to what the physical violence did to me.”
Writing the book meant reliving the pain, but also providing a means of moving on.
“There was my personal desire and need and hope, which was that I could finally be free of this story,” she says. “Or at least get me to a place where this was not a kind of narrative structure or narrative paradigm of my life — I could be, maybe be, in another one.”
The other hope was that it could enable the same for others — for survivors, and even for perpetrators of abuse. The book is as much a powerful reckoning for her father as it is for certain endemic strains of patriarchy that have necessitated that such characters always exist.
The apology of her book was a way of forcing what has been utterly absent in Ensler’s two decades of work in the movement to end violence against women, even in the watershed moments of the #MeToo era. “In all this time, I’ve never seen or heard a man make a public, thorough, authentic apology,” she says.
But Ensler does perceive a shift. The book, as opposed to her previous work that has often wrestled with gender and patriarchy, is receiving earnest attention from male readers, perhaps because of its adopted male voice. (Although all her work focuses on women’s experiences, it nevertheless has always been about men, too, she notes.) In a time when abuses and abusers are being unmasked more than ever before, the next step is for there to be “something catalyzed in them now,” Ensler says. “Where they actually come forward to think about what their actions have caused.”
She hopes, essentially, for what the apology she wrote did for her. For so much of her life, Ensler says, she had been defined by her relationship to her father. When she finished the book, something changed. “It felt like, it’s over,” Ensler says. “It’s over. This story is over.”