In the Body of the World

A Memoir of Cancer and Connection

Eve Ensler

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780805095241
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

From the bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues and one of Newsweek 's 150 Women Who Changed the World, a visionary memoir of separation and connection—to the body, the self, and the world Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection brought on by her father's sexual abuse and her mother's remoteness. "Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth, " she writes, "I could not feel or know their pain."But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully—and gratefully—joined to the body of the world.
Unflinching, generous, and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Scans
• Divided
• The Beginning of the End, or In Your Liver
• Dr. Deb, or Congocancer
• Somnolence
• Cancer Town
• Dr. Handsome
• What We Don’t Know Going into Surgery
• This Is Where You Will Cross the Uji River
• Two Questions
• Uterus = Hysteria
• Falling, or Congo Stigmata
• Lu
• Here’s What’s Gone
• The Stoma
• How’d I Get It?
• Circumambulating
• Ice Chips
• Patient
• The Rupture/The Gulf Spill
• Becoming Someone Else
• Beware of Getting the Best
• Stages/5.2B
• Infusion Suite
• Arts and Crafts
• The Room with a Tree
• A Buzz Cut
• Getting Port
• The Chemo Isn’t for You
• Tara, Kali, and Sue
• Crowd Chemo
• The Obstruction, or How Tree Saved Me
• I Was That Girl Who Was Supposed to Be Dead, or How Pot Saved Me Later
• Riding the Lion
• Chemo Day Five
• On the Couch Next to Me
• I Love Your Hair, or The Last Time I Saw My Mother
• It Was a Beach, I Think
• Shit
• Rada
• Death and Tami Taylor
• A Burning Meditation on Love
• My Mother Dies
• De-Ported
• Live by the Vagina, Die by the Vagina
• Farting for Cindy
• It Wasn’t a Foreboding
• Congo Incontinent
• Leaking
• She Will Live
• Sue
• Joy
• Mother
• Second Wind
• Acknowledgments
• Also by Eve Ensler
• About the Author
• Copyright