Reckoning

In the history of feminist activism, few have transformed personal trauma into global force for change quite like V, formerly known as Eve Ensler. Her name is inseparable from The Vagina Monologues, the groundbreaking theatrical work that since its 1996 premiere has been translated into 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries, shattering taboos around women’s bodies and sexuality while giving voice to millions. But in Reckoning, published in 2023, V takes us on a deeper journey through more than forty years of journals, poetry, dreams, and letters that document how she survived childhood sexual abuse, transformed self-hatred into radical self-love, and forged world-changing movements from personal pain. This is not simply a memoir but a manifesto on how to reckon with the past, speak for survivors, and write oneself into existence.

V, born in 1953, is a Tony Award-winning playwright, author, performer, and activist. She founded V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls that has organized thousands of performances and events worldwide, raising over one hundred million dollars for anti-violence projects. She created One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence across 200 countries. Most significantly, she co-founded City of Joy in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Christine Schuler Deschryver and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege, a revolutionary center for women survivors of violence. Published by Bloomsbury in January 2023, this 272-page work was named one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Memoirs of the Season, representing the distillation of V’s lifetime of work and reflection.

The form of Reckoning is itself an act of resistance. This is not a linear, tidy memoir proceeding chronologically from childhood to adulthood. Instead, it is a collage where poetry interweaves with prose, dreams merge with reality, and past dialogues with present. V extracts fragments from forty years of journals to create a unique narrative form that is simultaneously deeply personal and politically radical. This form reflects the nature of trauma itself: trauma is not linear but fragmented, repetitive, and intrusive. By adopting this form, V not only tells about trauma but embodies its lived experience through the very structure of her writing.

At the book’s core is V’s reckoning with her childhood, specifically her sexual abuse by her father. This is not the first time she has publicly addressed this trauma. In her 2019 book The Apology, she wrote an imagined apology from her father that she never received. But in Reckoning, she confronts more directly how trauma shaped her entire life: her body image, relationships, art, and activism. She describes how self-hatred became foundational to her existence, how for years she could not look at herself in mirrors, how she felt fundamentally dirty, broken, and unworthy of love.

Yet V’s narrative never stops at victimhood. She demonstrates how writing became her tool for survival and healing. From a young age, she kept journals, recording her pain but also her anger, dreams, and hunger for justice. Writing became an act of witnessing, a way of saying “this happened, this matters, I deserve to be heard.” Over time, writing transformed from private act to public performance, from journal to theater, from personal testimony to collective empowerment.

The birth of The Vagina Monologues emerged from this transformation. V began interviewing women about their bodies, sexuality, and experiences of violence, weaving these stories into a theatrical work. Its revolutionary power lay not just in addressing taboo topics but in creating space where women could openly discuss their experiences, speak the word “vagina” without shame, and claim ownership of their bodies. V describes the terror and exhilaration of the first performance, uncertain how audiences would react, but when she saw women laughing, crying, and nodding in recognition, she knew she had touched something profound and universal.

From The Vagina Monologues, V created V-Day, a global movement mobilizing communities to raise awareness and funds for local anti-violence organizations through creative events and theatrical performances. V-Day is not merely charity; it is a radical reimagining of activism, combining art and action, recognizing storytelling’s power and understanding that cultural change precedes political change. Over two decades, V-Day has raised over one hundred million dollars globally, funded thousands of anti-violence projects, and created countless spaces for community dialogue.

One of Reckoning’s most moving chapters concerns V’s work in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Eastern Congo has experienced one of the world’s worst sexual violence crises, with an estimated hundreds of thousands of women raped annually, rape used as a weapon of war deliberately destroying women’s bodies, spirits, and communities. When V first visited Congo in 2007, she was horrified by the atrocities she witnessed but even more shaken by the strength and resilience of survivor women. She partnered with local activist Christine Schuler Deschryver and Dr. Denis Mukwege, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for treating rape survivors, to co-found City of Joy.

City of Joy is not a traditional shelter or treatment center. It is a six-month leadership training program providing ninety survivor women annually with space for healing, education, self-defense training, and community building. V describes these women’s transformations: arriving broken, ashamed, and traumatized, but after six months of therapy, solidarity, and empowerment, leaving as leaders, activists, and agents of change. Many return to their communities to start organizations, run for office, and break silences. V writes that witnessing these transformations healed her own wounds; seeing them move from victim to survivor to warrior, she found her own path to healing.

But V also honestly confronts activism’s costs. She describes compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, and the psychological burden of constant exposure to violence narratives. She writes about moments of burnout when overwhelmed by despair, questioning whether her work truly makes a difference. She also addresses the complexities of being a white Western woman working in the Global South: avoiding savior complexes, genuinely listening to and following local women’s leadership, recognizing her own privilege and limitations. This willingness for self-critique is one of Reckoning’s strengths. V does not present herself as a perfect hero but as someone constantly learning, questioning, and striving to do better.

Reckoning is also a reckoning with the body. V writes about her complex relationship with her physical self: how childhood abuse alienated her from her body, how for years she abused her body through eating disorders, substance use, and dangerous sexual behavior as self-punishment. But she also writes about reclaiming her body through dance, sexuality, pregnancy and childbirth (she has a son), and aging. She refuses cultural narratives about how women’s bodies should look, behave, and exist. She celebrates her body’s strength, resilience, and pleasure even as it bears trauma’s scars.

Politically, Reckoning is a call for accountability. V writes about the need to hold perpetrators, systems enabling violence, and institutions profiting from violence responsible. She writes about how sexual violence in Congo connects to global capitalism: mining companies extracting cobalt and coltan (for our phones and computers) fund armed groups, destabilize communities, and create conditions where violence thrives. She writes about how climate change exacerbates gender violence: climate disasters cause resource scarcity, displacement, and conflict, all placing women and girls at greater risk. She insists feminism cannot focus solely on individual empowerment but must challenge the economic and political structures creating and sustaining violence.

The book includes V’s letters to various figures: her father, survivors, her future self. These letters are a form of dialogue, a way to process unresolved relationships and emotions. One of the most powerful is to her father, where she both acknowledges the harm he caused and attempts to understand his complexity as a human being. She does not forgive him, but she refuses to let his violence define her entire existence. She claims the right to tell her own story, in her own way, for her own purposes.

Poetry is integral to Reckoning. V’s poems are vivid, image-rich, and emotionally raw. They capture moments inexpressible in prose: trauma fragments, rage eruptions, joy flashes. Poetic form allows ambiguity, contradiction, multiple meanings, more truthfully reflecting human experience’s complexity. By interweaving poetry and prose, V creates a polyphonic narrative respecting experience’s richness and diversity.

From a feminist theory perspective, Reckoning powerfully demonstrates the classic feminist insight that the personal is political. V shows her personal trauma is not isolated tragedy but part of patriarchal violence’s systemic pattern. She situates her story within broader contexts of childhood sexual abuse, rape culture, body objectification, and women’s silencing, all interconnected forms of oppression. Simultaneously, she insists on personal narrative’s uniqueness and importance. She refuses to reduce survivors to statistics or abstract categories; each survivor has their own story, pain, and strength.

V’s work also embodies intersectional feminist principles. She recognizes gender violence intertwines with racism, colonialism, economic exploitation, and environmental destruction. Her Congo work is rooted in understanding how colonial history created the current crisis and how the global economy profits from conflict. She insists ending violence against women requires transforming entire systems, not just reforms.

Reckoning is also a tribute to storytelling’s power. V believes stories can change the world, not just through raising awareness but by creating empathy, building connections, and imagining alternative realities. Her entire career is built on collecting and sharing women’s stories in The Vagina Monologues, her other plays, and her activism. She shows that when women tell their own stories, refuse to be defined by others, and claim the right to name their own experiences, this itself is a radical act. In a world attempting to silence women, speaking loudly is rebellion.

For readers everywhere, Reckoning offers profound insights on trauma, healing, and activism that resonate cross-culturally. While V’s specific experiences are rooted in an American context, the themes she explores—childhood abuse, sexual violence, bodily autonomy, women’s solidarity, social change—are global. Her approach of combining personal healing with collective action provides a model for activists anywhere. Her belief in art as a tool for transformation challenges us to rethink the relationship between culture and politics. Her description of Congo work reminds us that feminism must be global and solidary, recognizing our struggles are interconnected.

V’s insistence on accountability is particularly relevant in contemporary discussions. Following the MeToo movement, questions about holding perpetrators accountable, supporting survivors, and preventing future violence have become urgent. V offers a model focusing not only on individual perpetrators but on systems enabling violence: laws, cultural norms, economic structures, political institutions. Her work shows true accountability requires systemic change, not just individual punishment.

Reckoning is not an easy book. It demands readers confront painful truths, endure discomfort, and question assumptions. But it is also a hopeful book. V shows healing is possible, not through denying or forgetting trauma but by facing it, processing it, and integrating it into one’s life narrative. She shows individuals can have enormous impact on the world, not through heroic solo acts but by connecting with others, building movements, and persisting for decades. She shows art and activism can nourish each other, that creativity can be a form of survival and resistance.

In closing, V reflects on what she has learned about love, loss, persistence, and change. She acknowledges the work is unfinished, violence continues, and the fight goes on. But she also celebrates what has been achieved: millions of women finding their voices, thousands of communities organizing against violence, countless survivors finding healing and strength. She invites readers to join this ongoing journey: telling their own stories, demanding accountability, imagining and creating a world without violence.

V’s Reckoning is a monumental work—simultaneously personal testimony and political manifesto, artistic creation and call to action. It shows how a writer and activist transformed a lifetime of pain into a force for change, personal trauma into collective healing, silence into song. For anyone interested in feminism, activism, trauma survival, or simply the extraordinary life of a woman who refused to be broken, this book is essential reading. It reminds us that reckoning is not just looking back at the past but creating the future—one where we can all exist fully, speak truth, and demand justice. As V writes: “I write myself into existence.” This is an invitation to us all: to write our own stories, reckon with our own pasts, and create the world we want to inhabit.