The COVID-19 pandemic may have caused countless businesses and homes to close their doors to the world, but it also inspired V (formerly Eve Ensler) to open a door into her journal, poem and other written work archives.

The writer of The Vagina Monologues, 69, compiled these archives for her latest book, Reckoning. Divided into themes such as “walls,” femicide, AIDS and grief, her new book asks the reader to reckon with all the pain that exists in the world — whether it is the current systemic racism prevalent in the U.S. or the country’s past treatment of the AIDS epidemic — and come to an understanding of how things came to be this way and what can be changed going forward.