The Center For Fiction welcomed award-winning journalist, reporter, and producer Carole Zimmer for a live taping of her fearless podcast Now What?, known for intimate conversations with people you’ve always wanted to get to know. Zimmer spoke with Tony Award-winning, bestselling writer of The Vagina Monologues, V (formerly Eve Ensler), about why she left Eve Ensler behind and where she and feminism are headed now with her new book, Reckoning. The political yet deeply personal memoir invites the reader into V’s life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. The discussion, like the book, was unflinching, introspective, and courageous, exploring ways to create an unstoppable force for change, what it means to love and survive love, and how to reclaim the body and write oneself into freedom.
Presented in partnership with Now What?
Featured Book
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Reckoning
By V (formerly Eve Ensler)
Published by Bloomsbury
The newest book from V (formerly Eve Ensler), Reckoning invites you to travel the journey of a writer’s and activist’s life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. Seamlessly moving from the internal to the external, the personal to the political, Reckoning is a moving and inspiring work of prose, poetry, dreams, letters, and essays drawn from V’s lifetime journals that takes readers from Berlin to Oklahoma to Congo, from climate disaster, homelessness, and activism to family.
Unflinching, intimate, introspective, courageous, Reckoning explores ways to create an unstoppable force for change, to love and survive love, to hold people and states accountable, to reckon with demons and honor the dead, to reclaim the body, and to see oneself as connected to a greater purpose. It reimagines what seems fixed and intractable, providing a path to understand one’s unique experience as deeply rooted in the world, to break through one’s own boundaries, and to write oneself into freedom.
In Conversation
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![_04A0403_WEB[1] - Vrinda Madan](https://centerforfiction.org/uploads/04A0403_WEB1-Vrinda-Madan.jpg)
V (formerly Eve Ensler)
V (formerly Eve Ensler)
V (formerly Eve Ensler) is the Tony Award-winning playwright and author of the Obie Award-winning theatrical phenomenon, The Vagina Monologues translated into 48 languages, performed in 140 countries along with many other plays. She is the author of a number of books including her latest best sellers, The Apology, translated into nearly 20 languages, and In the Body of the World as well as the New York Times bestseller, I Am an Emotional Creature. She starred on Broadway in The Good Body, and most recently off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club in the critically acclaimed, In the Body of the World. She helped create That Kindness: Nurses in Their Own Words presented by Brooklyn Academy of Music in accordance with theaters all across the country; a tribute to nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. She’s currently writing the story and co-writing lyrics for a musical fable, Wild, that made its world premiere in December 2021 at The American Repertory Theater. Film credits include The Vagina Monologues (HBO) and What I Want My Words to Do to You (Executive Producer, winner of the Sundance Film Festival Freedom of Expression Award, PBS), Mad Max: Fury Road (Consultant), and City of Joy documentary on Netflix. She is founder of V-Day, the 24-year-old global activist movement which has raised over 120 million dollars to end violence against all women (cisgender and transgender), gender diverse, girls and the planet—and founder of One Billion Rising, the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence in over 200 countries, as well as a co-founder of City of Joy. She writes regularly for the Guardian.
Photo Credit: Paula Allen
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Carole Zimmer
Carole Zimmer
Carole Zimmer is an award-winning journalist who has worked at National Public Radio, the NBC Radio Network and Bloomberg News where she served as a reporter and producer for 15 years. She’s also the recipient of numerous awards including a 2022 Clarion given by the Association of Women in Communications for the Now What? episode “Ricky Lake Reinvents Herself.” Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York magazine and other publications. And she’s performed in standup comedy clubs.
