Since it began, V-Day has galvanized women survivors to tell their stories, break the silence, and call out the systemic violence that perpetuates sexual violence against all women, including cis women, trans women, and those who hold fluid identities. Yet, we haven’t seen men move into the process of true apology. Of reckoning with their actions and moving towards accountability and transformation. Now is that time.
Coinciding with the release of V’s book The Apology in May 2019 and building upon years of work with survivors, activists and anti-violence groups, V-Day launched theapologybook.net as an online space for readers, activists and survivors to process and explore the themes raised in the book, for perpetrators to begin their own processes of accountability and apology, and for survivors to write imagined apologies and offer themselves healing.
Learn more at theapologybook.net and follow @theapology on Instagram
PRAISE FOR The Apology
“Profound, imaginative and devastating book … with a moving power and poetry in the prose that rouses her father from his grave and holds him to account.” —The Guardian
“…one of the most shatteringly brilliant books I have read. As soon as I finished it, I read it again, and again, and again (really).” —Decca Aitkinhead, The Sunday Times of London
“The geometry of toxic masculinity is contained within these pages.” —Marc Maron, WTF with Marc Maron
“‘The Apology’ contains the words that Ensler needed to hear her father say. It’s a slim book of unbearable heft. The text is presented as a letter written by her father from a kind of void beyond the grave, ‘floating, unmoored, spinning’.” —The Washington Post
“Playwright Eve Ensler exposes the origins of her famed play, ‘The Vagina Monologues,’ by assuming the voice of her father, Arthur, who she says molested, raped and abused her throughout childhood. ‘The Apology’ is more than a reckoning with a man long dead; it’s a healing exploration of how survivors can recover from sexual abuse.” —USA Today
“For those men – the famous and the unknown – ‘The Apology’ is a blueprint of contrition.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
The Apology is published by Bloomsbury and available here.
