Product Description

"I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them. . . . So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas, to do vagina interviews, which became vagina monologues. I talked with over two hundred women. I talked to old women, young women, married women, single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, African American women, Hispanic women, Asian American women, Native American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. At first women were reluctant to talk. They were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn't stop them."

So begins Eve Ensler's hilarious, eye-opening tour into the last frontier, the forbidden zone at the heart of every woman. Adapted from the award-winning one-woman show that's rocked audiences around the world, this groundbreaking book gives voice to a chorus of lusty, outrageous, poignant, and thoroughly human stories, transforming the question mark hovering over the female anatomy into a permanent victory sign. With laughter and compassion, Ensler transports her audiences to a world we've never dared to know, guaranteeing that no one who reads The Vagina Monologues will ever look at a woman's body the same way again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #170872 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-26
• Released on: 2007-12-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780345498601
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
"I say vagina because I want people to respond," says playwright Eve Ensler, creator of the hilarious, disturbing soliloquies in The Vagina Monologues, a book based on her one-woman play. And respond they do--with horror, anger, censure, and sparks of wonder and pleasure. Ensler is on a fervent mission to elevate and celebrate this much mumbled-about body part. She asked hundreds of women of all ages a series of questions about their vaginas (What do you call it? How would you dress it?) that prompt some wondrous answers. Standouts among the euphemisms are tamale, split knish, choochi snorcher, Gladys Siegelman--Gladys Siegelman?--and, of course, that old standby "down there." "Down there?" asks a composite character springing from several older women. "I haven't been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with [American president] Eisenhower." Two of the most powerful pieces include a jagged poem stitched together from the memories of a Bosnian woman raped by soldiers and an American woman sexually abused as a child who reclaims her vagina as a place of wild joy.

From Booklist
Ensler's powerful, funny, incisive, insightful meditation on one of the most proscribed, vilified, taboo-tainted, shame-shrouded bodily organs in our phallocratic culture is based on personal reminiscences and on interviews with dozens of women of various religious, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Its topics include the many attitudes women have about their vaginas, ranging from fear to fascination, and the ways those attitudes reflect and influence attitudes about sexuality, health, body image, and even spirituality. Even in the wrong hands--say, of a dry academician--Ensler's material would be enlightening. Fortunately, Ensler is first and foremost a storyteller and has fashioned her material into a highly readable script in which interviews are distilled to pithy brevity or reformatted as emotionally charged prose poems. Reading it, it is not hard to see why the off-Broadway one-woman show Ensler also crafted from its material met with critical and popular success and won Ensler a coveted Obie award. Jack Helbig

From Kirkus Reviews
An adaptation of performance pieces from Ensler's Obie Awardwinning one-woman show, inspired by several hundred interviews the playwright had with women about their genitals. The work, Ensler says, is intended to free women from the shame many have been taught to feel regarding their vaginas and, by extension, their sexuality. It's crucial, she says, ``for women to tell their stories, to share them with other people . . . Our survival as women depnds on this dialogue.'' The monologues (which range from a painful account of rape to a droll record of a woman learning to really see her vagina for the first time, in a ``vagina workshop'') vary greatly in effect, and other portions of the work (which run from character monologues to interpolations by Ensler to lists drawn from her questions to women, such as ``What does a vagina smell like?'') are fragmentary. You might have to be a woman to appreciate the humor and poignancy here, but women will. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

One of the most liberating books I've ever read.
This book is a life changer. I read it six months ago and I cannot believe how much it has liberated me and my attitude towards my body. Like everyone says, you cannot put it down once you begin reading it. Ensler talks about the things I've kept hidden. I never knew just how central to my life my vagina is. A chapter about menstruation, my god, people talk about this? A chapter about orgasm and hair and the fear we have of our own body. The part we never like to talk about. The chapter on birth is amazing, and until then I never knew how complex the woman's vagina is. For a woman of 22, this is a very important read. If you ever get to see her read from The Vagina Monologues, go. She puts on an amazing show. Some people think it's simple but I feel it's life-changing. I would be a very different person without it and not many books can have that kind on impact.

A surprising materpiece
I picked up the book in a local bookstore before the media here started paying attention to the play, which has recently opened in Brazil.

First of all, I was amused by the title. What would a vagina have to say? As a man, I could understand some female sensitivities, since men are a minority in my family. The Brazilian edition of the book has a microphone placed in front of a female pubis, and that surely looked funny to me.

I showed it to my wife, but she didn't have much of a positive reaction due to her conservative upbringing(she tries, though), but when I read her one of the stories she was amused

A few weeks later "The Vagina Monologues"was all the rage here. The Brazilian version of the play(directed and adapted by actor/director Miguel Falabella) opened in Rio de Janeiro, and suddenly everyone was talking about it. Even Eve Ensler, the author of the play, gave an interview to a local newsmagazine directed to the female public. One could not turn on the TV or open a newspaper without stumbling into a Vagina Monologues comment.

I havent (as of this writing) yet seen the play, but I found reading the book very enjoyable. It is a collection of very short stories related to various vagina-related subjects, such as the discovery of pleasure, childbirth, and even rape. There are also a few facts of the vagina world.

Personally, there are two favorite stories, in my opinion. The first is a married woman who dislikes having her pubic hairs shaved - she feels like a child when it is done to her, and the story on rape; the metaphorical description is so clear that brings tears to one's eyes.

As any other collection, there are also a bad moments - the introductiuon is sometimes annoying, for it reads like an outdated sixties feminist chant - but, all in all, the play, as a reading piece, is utterly enjoyable.

Bottom line: A good piece for both women and men, regardless of sexual option

"What can you tell about a woman . . ."
When I told my mother we were performing _The Vagina Monologues_ for V-Day 2000, she said, "What? What a disgusting thing to do!" That is exactly why _The Vagina Monologues_ must be read and performed -- to help us get over the disgust we have about our vaginas.

The variety of monologues in the book is incredible; Eve Ensler has created several personas that all tell you about their vaginas and their associated experiences. The monologues are well ordered -- the moods change from one to the other, with little overlap -- and you'll likely laugh, cry, squirm, cry, then laugh again.

Buy it, read it, share it.