The Apology: Eve Ensler’s New Book Is the Letter She Wishes Her Abusive Father Had Written (May 2019)
“I am done waiting.” Those are the first words in Eve Ensler’s groundbreaking new book, “The Apology,” in which the world-renowned playwright and activist imagines what it would mean for a survivor of abuse to hear the words she’s been waiting for her entire life: “I’m sorry.” Eve Ensler’s father sexually and physically abused her throughout her childhood, beginning when she was just 5 years old. His abuse caused immeasurable physical and emotional damage, but he never apologized for his actions. So Eve Ensler decided to write an apology for him, decades after his death. The result is a stunning new book in which Ensler writes to herself from her father’s perspective. In the book’s introduction, she writes, “My father is long dead. He will never say the words to me. He will not make the apology. So it must be imagined. For it is in our imagination that we can dream across boundaries, deepen the narrative, and design alternative outcomes.” Ensler says that she hopes the book will be a blueprint for an “age of reckoning.” Eve Ensler is the author of “The Vagina Monologues” and the founder of V-Day, an international movement to stop violence against women and girls. Ensler dedicates her new book to every woman still waiting for an apology.