The Apology by Eve Ensler

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars


In The Apology, Eve Ensler imagines the apology that never came from her father for all the physical and psychological abuse he subjected her to. He recounts how he began to sexually abuse her when she was five, and from there proceeded to beat her, humiliate her, and whittle away at her confidence in every way he could think of.

Ensler’s inventive approach is to imagine her father, after 31 years floating and spinning in an empty void, a kind of purgatory, reviewing what he did to her to her and trying to explain it. This approach enables Ensler to work intellectually through what he did and to fantasize that he comes to regret it. It’s a brave book, but it’s a difficult, brutal read, and I’m not sure what a third party gets out of this other than to really, really hate this guy.

As a reading experience, The Apology leaves you with more anger than insight. While Ensler hints at how she built herself back up to become successful, the conceit of the narrative doesn’t allow her to depict it with any detail. I’m not sure that we get any true insights into why her father did what he did. All she can do is guess at what he might have thought and said had he been forced to face his actions. Unexplored is what in the world the mother was thinking and doing through all this. Surely she recognized what her husband was doing. And her older brothers: how did they process all this? The father’s actions did not happen in a void. These family complexities would have been fascinating, albeit probably even more disturbing, to explore more fully.

As is stands, the book is raw and unsettling, and makes for harrowing reading. But as cathartic and necessary this apology must have been for Ensler to write, in the end it is her own reckoning with his abuse, not his. This extremely personal book is surely essential reading for fans of Ensler, but it’s a very tough read.