Eve Ensler Wants An Apology

This Isn’t A Psychologist’s Office.

- Eliana Dockterman

IT’S A cavernous Manhattan loft, the kind with an elevator that opens directly into the apartment. But my conversation with its resident, famed feminist Eve Ensler, feels suspiciously like a therapy session. And I’m the patient.

I should have seen this coming. Ensler, 65, has always been the probing sort: She made her name interviewing women about their genitalia, sexuality and body image, performing versions of their stories in The Vagina Monologues. Twenty-three years later, it remains a seminal feminist text and has been staged in more than 140 countries.

Today I’m here to talk to Ensler about a particularly difficult subject: her claim that her father physically and sexually assaulted her throughout her childhood, a topic she has historically evaded in interviews but is finally ready to address head-on. Thirty-one years after her father’s death, Ensler has written an apology to herself in his voice. That letter, spanning 112 pages, fills her physically slight but emotionally weighty book, The Apology, out May 14.

Ensler tells me that it’s one of her “deep fantasies” that abusers will use her book as a blueprint for an apology done right. She’s been disappointed by the self-pitying public statements released, particularly over the past year and a half, by men accused of abusing women. “I haven’t seen a single man reckon with what he’s done,” she says. “Sixteen thousand years of patriarchy, and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a real, public apology from a man.”