‘I was in a state of rage’: playwright V, formerly Eve Ensler, on her long fight against violence

The activist and writer of the Vagina Monologues has no intention of stopping her quest to end violence against women

The new book by V – the playwright formerly known as Eve Ensler – is called Reckoning. She says the word slowly, as if it’s falling downstairs, or perhaps, was pushed. During Covid, “I started to really think about what it means to reckon with things. To really face them.” Before the pandemic she’d never had the time – reckoning, she realised, requires a certain stillness. Across the world, she saw people doing the same, as inequities, cruelties, memories, were rising to the surface and forcing uncomfortable confrontations. “And then I thought, what are the things I’ve reckoned with? What are the things I’ve been doing over this lifetime? How do they connect?”

For years, Ensler was an obscure New York poet and playwright, battling addiction and working in a homeless shelter. Her life shifted in 1996, aged 35, when her play The Vagina Monologues became a theatrical phenomenon, now published in over 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries by people such as Meryl Streep and Oprah Winfrey. Its success changed her in two ways. First, it gave her a new understanding of violence against women, its terrible universality, the realisation that we’re all in this together. Second, it gave her fame. Using the latter to confront the former, she launched V-Day, a global movement that’s raised millions to try to end violence against women; created a campaign which brings one billion women (the number of women estimated to be beaten or sexually assaulted during their lives) on to the streets each Valentine’s Day to protest against violence; and created City of Joy, a community built around survivors of rape and abuse in the Democratic Republic of Congo. From there, she took her place as an awkward feminist hero, sometimes scoffed at, often revered.

We meet in London at the beginning of winter. She is visiting from her “pod”, the home she shares with a handful of queer friends in the woods near New York City, where they write, and cook, and have parties and dance. “I’m so grateful for what a journey Vaginas took me on. It’s been an absolutely incredible life.” And yet, there’s never been a world, she says, in which “the vagina lady” has really fit. “So I had to carve out my own path. Women who talk about the body, about sex, are highly judged. You get strangely exiled – at the same time as people want you, they don’t want you around? It’s very complicated. It’s like how people feel about women’s sexuality, right?” She chuckles, and pulls up her over the knee woollen boots, her style – her white blonde crop, her attitude – not quite of this time or place, a dash of the 60s, of 80s, that brisk warm glamour.

Her book is a collection of diary entries, poems and articles spanning 45 years, examining cycles of trauma – it’s raw and upsetting, on climate activism, Aids, and abuse, and there are stories of violence that stay with you like nightmares. In a monologue from 2015, she says: “I’ve been writing this same piece for 20 years. I have tried it with data and detachment, passion and pleading, existential despair, and even now as I write I wonder if we have evolved a language to meet this century.” It’s an attempt at accountability, and to find some way forward.

“Everything we’re looking at in the world right now is about not reckoning with something, right? Like, the horrible events of 7 October, they grew out of something,” she says. Segregation, she means, occupation, removals of freedom. “And we haven’t reckoned with it. So now, it’s escalated into this horrific situation where the world is being forced to witness mass murder. It’s a perfect example of how, when we don’t reckon with given situations, they produce more and more violence.” Our conversation has barely begun, but she is pressing away tears and pausing before going on. I take a breath.

Nobel prize winner Dr Denis Mukwege was a co-founder of City of Joy – he emails from DRC about V, “an extraordinary, emotional creature”. Her work, he says, “supports us in times of despair”. Annie Lennox gets in touch, too, to talk about her empathy, courage and brilliant intellect. “She’s absolutely the real deal.” “She takes the pain in the world personally,” emails writer Arundhati Roy, “In her body. She faces it. And survives.” Her friends speak about her with a sort of defensive awe. “She doesn’t have a membrane of protection,” says author Naomi Klein. “She feels all the pain and all the love very deeply.” In 2011, Ensler invited Klein to the opening of City of Joy. “She had just come through battling cancer,” remembers Klein, “and what kept her alive and fighting was her desire to see City of Joy opened. Seeing her there, surrounded by so many women who have been through unspeakable trauma in a place devoted to turning pain into political power, turning trauma into love and strength was an image I’ll never forget.” Throughout her adult life, V has run towards violence, from warzones to women’s prisons – she frames it as a compulsion. “Because, violence was the central role in my life. I am a consequence of violence. Every day of my life was shaped by it.”

She travelled to Germany when the Berlin Wall was coming down and had a dream there about being sexually abused. Before then, she had no memory of her childhood, but something had been dislodged, the political triggering the personal. From the age of five, her father had sexually abused her. By the time she was 10, he was choking and punching her, while her mother routinely turned away. “I was moulded by it. When you’re always expecting a punch or a loud voice, it makes you very sensitive to violence in the world, and very tuned into the other violences going on everywhere, whether done in the dark, or inside the house, or inside wars where nobody’s looking. I’ve been obsessed with violence my whole life and what it is, and why we never examine the roots of it. It seems that patriarchy’s reaction to violence is revenge, and more violence.”

Having touched on the legacy of her abuse in earlier memoirs, iIn 2019, at 65, Ensler published The Apology, written as a letter of penitence from her father. “Writing that, I really understood how hard it is to look at the origins of violence. For years, I would never have examined my father to find out why he did what he did. Because I didn’t care. I was just in a state of rage.” As #MeToo unfolded, “It occurred to me that, even after so many men being called out, there were no men actually apologising, or asking, who am I? Why would I abuse someone? And I thought to myself, why is that?” She puts her head to the side, wondering.

“Well, maybe the non-apology is one of the columns of patriarchy,” one of the structures that keeps patriarchy steady. “Apology is a form of reckoning, so the non-reckoning, the non-responsibility, it keeps all of this fragmented violence spinning.”

She pauses. Of course, she must have talked about this hundreds of times, but she gives the impression that these thoughts are arriving right now, here, for me. “Writing that book was so liberating, because I realised – it had nothing to do with me. My father had his own trajectory I was just, I was just standing there. By going through that process in my own self, I freed myself from my father’s narrative. Which feels both amazing and very disorienting.” There’s a line at the end of The Apology, “Oh, man, be gone.” “And I don’t know if I wrote it, or he wrote it, because by that point, I feel like we were writing the book together, even though he’d been dead for 31 years. But it was like he was gone. And I realised, I had no more rancour, no more bitterness. But I also didn’t want his name, or the name he had given me.” That’s when Eve Ensler became V. “And it felt like, OK, I’m down to a letter and soon I’ll be nothing. Lighter, lighter.”

When she began organising Valentine’s Day events, she had full confidence that, within three years, violence against women would be a thing of the past. She likened it to slavery – a barbaric practice we would look back on with shame. Even as the years have fallen away, sShe’s held fast to this ambition, but when I ask whether she still believes she could end violence against women, she falters. “I obviously was really naive, or idealistic when I began. I don’t think I realised how intractable and how stubborn patriarchy is. I thought it would be easier to dismantle it, to be honest with you.” It’s not that we haven’t progressed, she says. “But we’re still in the bell jar, we’re still in the paradigm of patriarchy. We haven’t changed that story. I don’t know now, if it will happen in my lifetime.” She seems quietly maddened. The idea was that men would join the conversations. “And it’s been really shocking to see the reluctance. Why are women still fighting to end violence against ourselves? Men should be doing this. And the fact they’re not, that men didn’t grab hold of this and take it on, shows there’s something here that is just so hard to crack apart. Because it’s so lodged in people. We were born into this.” She looks down at her hands. “I think people don’t even let themselves imagine a world where women, trans women, all women, are safe and free.”

One day, running a writing workshop in prison, she asked the group to write what the world would be like without violence. People often struggled with the assignment, but here, a woman simply refused. “She said she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t open herself up to that vulnerability, she didn’t believe it was possible, and she couldn’t even let herself imagine it because it would be too sad.” It shook V, but she understood. “But if we can’t imagine things, we can’t create them. There is a failure of imagination now – we’ve limited who we can become. And when you break out of that, people make fun of you.” Of her. “They think you’re not rigorous or intellectual.” Still, “I think there’s real rigour in allowing yourself to conjure a world where women are free.”

She feels an urgency now. Perhaps she always has, but recently, having seen how “easily people’s lives get crushed by violence” and its effect on generations to come, she feels a need to work faster. She’s learned, “when you shut down boys, tell them they can’t have doubts, can’t be weak, can’t cry, you’re creating a non-human. It’s hardened tears that make bullets. This is the work we need to do, help each other be vulnerable, and be in grief and be in our sorrow. And have all of our feelings as opposed to being in… performance.” She’s writing a piece about the climate crisis that she hopes will do for the environment what The Vagina Monologues did for women – she has the sense time is running out. From her “pod”, she walks in the woods and thinks about death. “How do we give way to it?” like nature does. “How do we surrender, and make peace with what we lose?” She smiles. “I just love being 70. You are basically cooked – everything else is like icing after that, and so it’s not about proving yourself any more. It’s just: doing what you believe in, and not worrying about the consequences.”

In her third act, she wants to, “Move things forward without needing to leave a mark.” She wants to clear the path for the next generation of feminists, she wants to do her work, empty of ego, of any of the many identities she’s claimed or been given, she says. “Lighter.” Now, “I just… I want to be wind.”

Reckoning by V is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99. Buy it for £14.95 from guardianbookshop.com

Fashion editor Jo Jones; hair and makeup by Nohelia Reyes using Laura Mercier and Leonor Greyl; styling assistant Sam Deaman; photographer’s assistant Rosie Wilson

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