From the bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues and one of Newsweek’s 150 Women Who Changed the World, In the Body of the World is a memoir of separation and connection—to the body, the self, and the world.

The playwright, author, and activist 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.

While working in the Congo, Ensler is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased.

As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the earth, she is finally joined to the body of the world. Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.