Like millions of women, Eve Ensler has been waiting much of her lifetime for an apology. Sexually and physically abused from the age of 5 by her father, Eve has struggled and suffered her whole life from this betrayal, longing for an honest reckoning from a man who is long dead. After years of work as an artist and anti-violence activist, she decided she was no longer waiting; an apology could be imagined, by her, for her, to her. This book, The Apology, written by Eve from her father’s point of view in the words she longed to hear attempts to transform the abuse she suffered, with unflinching truthfulness, compassion, and an expansive vision for the future.

Through The Apology Eve has set out to provide a new way for herself and a possible road for others, so that survivors of abuse may finally imagine how to be free. In it, she grapples with questions she has sought answers to since she began to understand the impact of her father’s abuse on her life: How do we offer a doorway rather than only a locked cell? How do move from humiliation to revelation, from curtailing behavior to changing it, from condemning perpetrators to calling them to reckoning?

The Apology is a remarkably original book that explores the deepest and most intimate questions that can be asked at this moment: Why do men carry out abuse, often against the people they know and love the most? How can we–together–stop it? What does it mean to apologize for these acts? What will it take for the men who have committed abuse to make a deep reckoning and actually apologize? As Tony Porter from A Call to Men says, “We’ve called men out, now how do we call them in?”

The Apology is an acutely transformational book - about how, from the wounds of sexual abuse, we can begin to re-emerge and heal. It is a revolutionary book asking everything of each of us: courage, truthfulness, and forgiveness.