Playwright, author and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to thinking about the female body--how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet, as she recounts in this inspiring memoir, she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body--a disconnection first brought on by her father's battering and sexual abuse and her mother's remoteness. But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. On a trip to the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body.