In the Body of the World

My goal is to read 100 books by the end of 2013.  I just finished book 44.

In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler

Summary (via Goodreads):
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 horrific 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.

My Opinion:
This book had a very lyrical quality to it and reads like poetry.  Her heart and soul were bared in these pages; it would be impossible not to be moved by her words.  Although she will never rest as long as there are women who need her voice to speak for them, I hope this writing was therapeutic enough to give her some peace from her inner demons because she certainly deserves it.

Quote from the Book:
"So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things.  I had been so busy creating a future of love that I never identified the life I was living as the life of love, because up until then I had never felt entitled enough or free enough or, honestly, brave enough to embrace my own narrative."