After surviving intense abuse as a child, V grew up to pen powerful prose and plays—and today fights for women suffering around the world.
Transcript
TW: Sexual assault, abuse
Debbie Millman:
Eve Ensler is no more. After she finished her latest book, The Apology, written from the point of view of her father, who physically and sexually abused her when she was a child, she changed her name. Eve Ensler is now simply V. She joins me from her home in Upstate New York to talk about The Apology, and about her extraordinary career as an activist and playwright. V is the author of The Vagina Monologues, which first appeared off Broadway, off-off Broadway, in 1996, and has been performed around the world ever since.
Just some of her additional books and plays include The Good Body, I Am An Emotional Creature, The Treatment, Necessary Targets, as well as the remarkable memoir—which was also a one-woman show—titled In the Body of the World. V, welcome to Design Matters.
V:
Oh, I’m so happy to be here with you, Debbie. I love your show, and I’m so excited to have a conversation.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, thank you. I’m so honored that you’re here. V, I understand that you have a singing street dog from Tijuana named Pablo. What does he sing?
V:
Love that you know that.
Debbie Millman:
What does he sing?
V:
Well, he sings just about everything, but his favorite song is “Happy Birthday,” without a doubt. There is never a moment that anyone sings “Happy Birthday” that he doesn’t join in. He’s quite astonishing. He’s an empath. He’s really one of the most special creatures I’ve ever met. It comes from deep, deep within him, and he fully commits himself to every song with the greatest passion, and it wipes him out afterwards. He gets really tired.
Debbie Millman:
Where did you find him? Did you find him in Tijuana or did he come from Tijuana?
V:
A person, a really lovely woman who is devoted to rescuing animals, was here. I was really hungering for a dog. I hadn’t had one in a few years because of traveling, and I just didn’t feel like it was fair, but when I moved to the woods, it was time. She showed me this picture of this dog that she was maybe going to give her sister, and I was like, “No. That’s my dog. I know that’s my dog.”
She was so kind because I was performing In the Body of the World at the time, so she and my son, they had the dog trained for me, and then the day after the show closed, they brought Pablo as my present. Oh, my God! He is such a special, special, special being.
Debbie Millman:
Dogs really do have the ability to transform how a person loves. I had two dogs for quite a long time, and I credit them with opening my heart.
V:
I really think it’s true. I mean, there’s a generosity, there’s a devotion. I’m actually working on this piece that it’s now in his voice. It’s going to be his book.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, interesting.
V:
Yeah, and he has friends from all over the world. One of his friend’s adventures, he talks about devotion and how people don’t understand devotion, and they always misinterpret it. They say, “Oh, you’re acting like a dog,” in this kind of condemning and undermining way. When in fact devotion is a high level of intimacy and emotional achievement. I think he teaches me so much about devotion, and what devotion to anyone or anything really means. It’s so beautiful.
Debbie Millman:
I can’t wait to read it. V, ordinarily I start my interviews with my guest’s origin story, and journey along into their education and career, obstacles and triumphs. There is, for the most part, a narrative arc that I follow usually in the interviews with my guest’s most recent work. In order to really do your life story justice in the best way I can in an hour or so, I decided to start with your most recent book and then go back to the beginning, and then move ahead into your future.
Last year, you published a memoir titled The Apology, where you imagined what your now-deceased father would say to you if he were able to apologize for the sexual and physical abuse he inflicted on you as you were growing up. You begin the memoir with a simple dedication for every woman still waiting for an apology. Why that dedication?
V:
Well, I think after working now for over 20-some odd years in violence against all women and girls, and touring the world, literally, I’ve been to probably close to 80 countries sitting with women in refugee camps and town hall meetings and in places where women have suffered the greatest violence. And listening to story after story after story, what just hits me and has hit me over and over is how few, if any, women I’ve ever met have ever received an apology from their perpetrator, and the impact of that—the long-term impact of never ever hearing the person who devastated your life take responsibility or make amends for it, own it, step into it.
I think there is a longing, there is a yearning in so many women for that apology, for that reparation, in the same way that if we look at what’s happening with Black Lives Matter right now, there is a longing for apology, for acknowledgment, for reckoning, for reparations. And the same with indigenous people who were here at the beginning of this country. I think what really hit me as I’ve listened to women is there’s not even the expectation of that apology, right?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
V:
There’s not even the belief that that’s even remotely possible in any realm. That feels outrageous to me.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I read that you’ve been disappointed by these self-pitying public apologies over the last two years by men accused of abusing women, and stated that you haven’t seen a single man reckon with what he’s done. Do you think it’s too much to ask that abusers could use your book as a blueprint for an apology done right?
V:
Well, there’s this wonderful journalist named Decca Aitkenhead, who did a wonderful piece on the book when it first came out in London. She said she suggests that every survivor send this anonymously to their perpetrator, which I thought was a genius idea. It’s been really an interesting journey with this book, and it’s really been surprising because what’s been surprising is how many men have responded to it, how many letters I’ve gotten from men, how many male journalists or male reviewers seem to understand it, and how many men it seems to me are looking for a way to come to terms with what they’ve done, with bad behavior, with a history that is plaguing them, but don’t have the means, don’t have the method.
I’m more optimistic since writing the book that there could actually be a time when we begin to move into a time of reckoning. I mean, I think that’s happening in terms of racial justice right now, that we are moving into an all-out uprising reckoning. I think Me Too was the beginning perhaps of the next stage of a reckoning around sexual and physical abuse, but I think it’s going to require a lot to get there. I feel that without that reckoning, I don’t really know how we go forward. I don’t know how real change happens.
Debbie Millman:
I was watching the TED Talk that you gave back in December at TED Women, and I don’t know if you have read the comments on your talk that’s currently up at TED.com, but there’s a man that comments who wrote in and both disclosed that he had been abused and then also that he was an abuser. I thought that was a remarkable result of someone hearing you talk and then having their own reckoning. It’s a really remarkable comment.
V:
I’ve gotten a bunch of those letters, really deep, deep letters from men who have done things that they’re really ashamed of and feel bad about, and need help with. My dream, and I was building toward this before COVID happened, is to do a group with men and follow the four stages that I wrote about and talked about in the TED Talk, and film it, so that we have a model of a group that men could look at, and then begin to do in their communities in their own way.
I think this is really such an exciting idea to me because I think one of the things I have learned about this whole process of apology is that it’s for you. It’s for you, the perpetrator, in so many ways, more profound than it even is for your victim, because all of us walk around with the residue and the guilt and the shame and the pain and the remnants of harm we have caused in other people.
There are shards of it. It’s in our makeup. It’s in our being, and it impacts our daily interactions with people. I think if we could create processes and groups and ways that men could begin to do these reckonings without being totally shamed, without being totally judged, without being [inaudible], but a really deep, profound reckoning process that went on for some time. I think it is the way forward.
Debbie Millman:
This is a reparative type of justice that occurs when something like that can happen.
V:
I think at this point in time that the only justice that really is going to move us forward is reparative justice, right? I think everybody is born into races, patriarchy, right? Everyone is born into this programming, into this DNA. As a result of that, we are all either consciously or unconsciously accidentally, or because we’ve done something that we meant to do, we’re all part of that story, and I think we’ve got to stop dismantling and unraveling it.
I think the way we do that is to begin to go deeply into ourselves and look at the roots of it. When did it begin in us? What made us the kind of man who was capable, like my father, of raping me, of beating me, of abusing me, of destroying me? Then really looking at what did he do, what are the actual detailed accountings of what he did, because so many men who even have pretended to take responsibility—“Well, I’m sorry if I hurt you,” or, “I’m sorry if I abused you”—that doesn’t mean anything.
It’s really looking at the details of what you’ve done, the actualities of what you’ve done, and then looking at what are the impacts of that, what feeling, what your victim felt going inside and sitting with the suffering you’ve caused, and then making amends.
I think that process is deep and it takes time, but it’s also so cleansing and so liberating, and allows one to begin a whole other kind of life.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk a little bit about your upbringing. You were born in New York City, but were raised in the northern suburb of Scarsdale, New York. You described how your father looked like Cary Grant. Your mother looked like Doris Day. And you’ve said you were a dead ringer for Anne Frank. In The Apology, you write that your parents didn’t think of you and your siblings as anything more than props for their evolving lifestyle. Can you elaborate a little bit?
V:
I’ve never really been able to watch “Mad Men” because it gave me such anxiety.
Debbie Millman:
Me too.
V:
Really?
Debbie Millman:
Me too. Yes.
V:
I just couldn’t do it.
Debbie Millman:
I’ve watched one episode. I couldn’t handle it.
V:
Me too. I just couldn’t do it. I just wanted to throw up. I think it was a time when people were having children as things, right? They were these things. I don’t know that my mother went, “Wow! I really want to have children that I’ll love, and nurture, and get to know, and develop.” It was what you did.
To be honest, that whole thing—you are meant to be seen and not heard, you are meant to disappear at cocktail hour—I never really saw myself as a subject, as a person in the reality. It was just something that got brought out in certain moments. There were pictures that got taken. You know what I mean? There were holidays that you fit into the holiday image of a tree, even though we were Jewish but we weren’t. I don’t know. I never felt real. I never felt like a real person to them, which is in some ways very objectifying and it makes it much easier to hurt that person because they’re not real in some fundamental way.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it seemed very much like your father didn’t think you were real. You were more an extension of him—
V:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
… to do with what he wanted. The first five years of your life seemed rather typical. You were a bright, engaging, spirited, highly creative child. You were deeply ethical. You described how you shared everything with your siblings. You never told on your brother or sister even if it could benefit you. You had an implicit and demanding sense of loyalty. You described how it was very important for you to be good. Where did that need for goodness come from?
V:
Such a good question. I mean, I know where it came from after all the very bad stuff started, because I think once my father incested me, and once he sexually abused me, and then once he started to beat me, I was being called bad all the time, all the time, all the time. I was soiled.
So, I think the quest, the desire to be good, became the only thing that mattered to me in my life, really the only thing that mattered because I think he had told me so consistently and so often, with such intensity and such rage and such violence, that I was bad, that I felt bad. I felt bad. I just wanted to die all the time from that feeling of badness.
So, so much of my life up to a certain point was … when you believe you’re bad, you get involved with the wrong kind of people, and the reason you’re involved with people is to prove that you’re good and to get them to agree that you’re good, but you often pick people who aren’t capable of doing that, right?
Debbie Millman:
Right. Also, you become an endless pool of need. You can’t really get somebody to get you to feel that way. It’s super hard to put that on someone else.
V:
It’s impossible, and it’s not their job, right? It’s your job to decide you’re good, and it’s your job to determine your worth and your value. Yet it takes so long to figure that out. Oh my God! So long.
Debbie Millman:
I’m still working on it, 59.
V:
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you, once you get into your 60s, something happens, I promise you.
Debbie Millman:
That’s what I’ve been hearing. I’m close, not quite, but close. Your father started to abuse you when you were 5, which is just unthinkable. It continued until you were 10, all the years of your brain forming. When he stopped abusing you sexually at 10, he began beating you physically, and this went on daily. You described the transformation from bright young child to abused 10-year-old girl in The Apology, and how your father worked daily to destroy your character and break your will. Though I know it’s difficult, I was wondering if you might read a short excerpt of what that transformation was like.
V:
OK. “You moved like a ghost. You rarely lifted your head and hardly spoke. You never washed your hair, and it was always stringy and dirty. You were unable to concentrate in school and did poorly in class. You could not pass an exam. You seemed unable to remember or contain anything at all. You were becoming stupid. You were demoted to the lower ranks and lost your closest friends. Other children could smell your desperation, and avoided you like the plague or teased and taunted you. I despised you for your sweetness, but how could I admit that I was responsible for your decline? How could I tolerate the visible outcome of my brutality? Instead, I humiliated you further, and made you feel your badness had made this happen, that my sweetie pie had through her assertion and rejection become a dirty, shameful girl.”
Debbie Millman:
You outlined how you were taunted by other children, and when you were 10 years old, you were assaulted by some boys in your class. They stripped you and called you seaweed hair because your hair was stringy. Did no one help you? No one?
V:
No. On the contrary, I became hysterical after they stripped me and they pulled my underpants down in front of the whole school. My parents were called in. My father immediately began to say and demand what I had done, what slutty, horrible thing I had done to get them to do this to me. I wasn’t believed. I was wrong, and I was the reason that happened. Then for weeks after, we’d go into the cafeteria and they’d call me slut, and they would call me dirty stringy hair.
It was horrible, but I think what we know, those of us who have been abused sexually particularly, is we start to radiate this strange desperate energy that really begins to attract more abuse. Whether it was working in prison for eight years or working in homeless shelters, I cannot tell you how often I hear the story of a girl being abused by her father or uncle or somebody in her family, and then that just the summation of self, and then how it begins to attract rapes and abuse from all kinds of other people.
It’s almost like a pheromone. It’s something you’re sending out—
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Absolutely.
V:
… that says you’re broken, that says you’ve been destroyed, you’re worthless, and you can be taken.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I remember many, many, many years ago I used to for business have to rent a car quite frequently, and I would go to the same car rental place, and there was a work person there who I decided reminded me very much of my very, very first boyfriend in high school, who was very awful to me and abusive. Then one day, I walked into the Hertz Rental, and it was at the Hertz Rental, and I realized that that very same man looked exactly like my stepfather who had caused me quite a lot of harm.
I thought, Oh, my God! I just went from one abuser to another just seamlessly without even knowing it.
I do think that there is this antenna that people that have experienced this type of extreme, extreme behavior rewire themselves to try to either overcome it or redo it somehow in a way that you become the victor or some way to be able to understand it.
V:
I think that’s one part of it, and I think there’s another weird part of it, which is it’s very suicidal. It’s already happened. You’ve lost any agency over yourself. So, you might as well, the world might as well, just do it to you.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
V:
There was a part of me that had given up on myself, right? That just assumed that’s what was coming my way, that’s what I deserved, right? That’s how bad I was.
Debbie Millman:
You write about how you learned to separate from your shame and terror by constructing an alternative persona that developed the capacity to feel nothing, and you learned how to disappear. Do you have any sense of how you did that, or was it just subliminal and happened organically because of what was happening?
V:
I think it began when I was being incested that I left my body, and I just think I left and I was above myself, and I floated out of myself because it was too much. Everything about it was too much for my nervous system, for my developing sexuality, for my cells, for my consciousness, for my understanding. So I began to learn how to go away. I learned how to shut down. I learned how to be dead, and then I can remember when my father … my father was always so angry because he drank, and alcohol, and you just listen to the footsteps. You could begin to sense what was happening.
I remember he would call me down and scream at me, and I would go and look in the mirror and I would look at myself, and I would be like, “You will go away. You will not feel this. You will not be touched by this. You will not let any …”
I would literally talk myself out of myself, right? It worked. He couldn’t touch me, but there’s a huge price to pay for that, which is that you begin to split, right?
Debbie Millman:
Right. You’ve written about how you turned off your valves of empathy, because to feel anyone else’s pain would have meant to feel your own, and you couldn’t do that. As I was reading both In the Body of the World and The Apology, I was struck by even your moments of generosity even in that … one of the experiences I related to in your writing was when you tried to organize all the unpopular girls in your high school to form their own group, and to “take back” the power. I think you were even trying in your own way to create some type of mutuality. What happened when you did that?
V:
It was like the test case for activism or anything. It was highly unsuccessful because of pores. All the girls who were in the unpopular tribe were antisocial. So, they had no desire to be part of anything like an unpopular girls club.
Debbie Millman:
How many people from your high school have reached out to you on Facebook or social media to connect over the years?
V:
A bunch have. I’ve had a really great story that really, really moved me. When I wrote The Vagina Monologues, I interviewed hundreds of people, but all the monologues are literary fictitious pieces, right? They’re themes, they’re ideas, and they’re characters, but when I wrote The Flood, there was this character of this woman who had gone on the state, and she had a humiliating experience.
Now, nobody told me the particular story of this woman who had a flood. I just made that up. I used this name for the piece, which was Andy Lefpo. It was the combination of the two boys who had stripped me in my school. It was my just little way of saying, “OK, writing is the best revenge,” right?
So, I got an email one day from one of the boys who had seen the play. He said, “I believe you were writing about me because of the horrible thing I did to you, and that’s great. I have never forgotten it. I have really never forgiven myself for it. I’m really writing to ask for your forgiveness.”
Debbie Millman:
Wow. Good for him.
V:
It was mind-blowing. Then, recently, on this tour, his wife came to a reading of The Apology just to say how sorry she was. So, that was amazing. That was amazing.
Debbie Millman:
That’s extraordinary.
As you were growing up, you said that drugs and booze saved your life until they started to destroy it. You did heroin the night before your French SATs and were still so stoned the next day, you drew a huge black ‘X’ through the entire exam. How did you end up going to Middlebury College in Vermont after that?
V:
Well, it wasn’t my first college. By the time high school was ending, I was a complete, I mean, I was just a complete drug addict and alcoholic by then, but my father had somehow applied, I don’t even know, probably participated at this school called Beaver College in Glenside, PA. I actually went there for a year. Something had happened at the end of my high school where these two wonderful teachers had confronted me and said, “We don’t believe you’re stupid. We don’t believe you’re any of these things. We think you’re really smart, and we want to work with you.”
They had helped me to the point where I passed this AP honors history class, which was the only time my brain had ever been able to think in all those years, right? My brain was so tortured. I had no memory. I had no ability to concentrate. That was the beginning of something. Then when I got to the school, I suddenly started to achieve academically. I started to do really, really well. I transferred after the first year to Middlebury.
Debbie Millman:
What did you think you wanted to do professionally at that point in your life?
V:
I think from the time I was young, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I wrote because I had to write. It was like creating this alternative persona that lived in my journals, that lived where I wrote. It was like I could create language and I could create stories, and I could create another world where I could live, I could be free, I could survive, right?
I didn’t think, Oh, I want to be a writer. I just knew I had to write, right? I knew I had to write, and it’s still the same now. I have to write every day. That’s what I have to do. It’s how I survive, to be honest with you, and how I keep sane.
I think I started to do really well at Middlebury in terms of writing. So, when I came to New York, I was writing poetry, but in those days, you certainly couldn’t make a living being a poet. So, I thought maybe I’ll direct theater. Then all of a sudden, it merged like, “Oh, I could write plays,” like the coming together of poetry and directing. So, that’s how that evolved. It never occurred to me, to be honest with you, that I would be anything else.
Debbie Millman:
Well, there was actually quite a lot of things that you did before you found yourself. You gave the commencement speech at your graduation from Middlebury in 1975, and spoke out against racism and sexism, and have described how you then sat down in your seat in your cap and gown and drank a bottle of Jack Daniels that was passed to you in a brown paper bag. I’m wondering if you could read another excerpt about that time and what happened next?
V:
Yes, that wonderful Jack Daniels. OK. “I love my thesis on suicide in contemporary American poetry as I bartended and got laid on the pool table in the back. I was a caretaker in a Chelsea House for schizophrenics, and a group leader in a homeless shelter on 30th Street. I followed Jonah Bark’s route around France and took the train to Rome at midnight, and wore a spiky high heels for an Italian leather dyke. I took acid for three days on the train from Montreal to Vancouver, where I had a one night stand with the famous Muslim jazz player who seduced me with his saxophone and prayerful calling.
“I found my way into rape refugee camps in Bosnia, where [inaudible] into the Taliban’s Afghanistan, drove espresso pumps through landmine roads in Kosovo. I had to see it, know it, touch it, find it. Maybe I was playing out my badness or searching for my goodness or getting closer and closer to the deepest inhumanity to try to understand how to survive the very worst we are capable of.”
Debbie Millman:
This part of your story is so incredibly heartbreaking. One of the places, one of the many places I cried in The Apology, was how you described how you were accepted to a very prestigious graduate school, but because you didn’t have any money and your father wouldn’t help you, you couldn’t go. Where were you accepted? You don’t ever reveal that. I’m just wondering if you would mind saying.
V:
I was accepted into Yale. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Wow. Wow.
V:
Yeah. It was really one of the most devastating moments. If I look back, it took me on a whole other journey. It took me on a whole other journey. I don’t regret it one tiny bit. I had to survive. I had to make a living. I had to find a way to … I had no money. I had no support. I had nothing. I had years where I had to struggle and struggle and struggle and struggle. Those years made me. They created my character. They made me much, much more connected to working people, to people in struggle, to people in suffering, than I ever would have been had I gone to Yale.
So, I lost the connections. I lost the network. I lost the pipeline to success, right? In a way, it opened my soul. It took me on a journey to the most amazing places in the world. I never would have written The Vagina Monologues had I gone to Yale. Never.
Debbie Millman:
Really? Really? You don’t think so?
V:
Nope. I don’t think so. I think I would have been carved into a much more traditional path. Do you know what I mean? I would have learned what the limitations were, and how to be careful of them, but because there was no one supporting me, and there were … there were people, actually, that came along who supported me. I just invented my life because I had to, right?
There’s something about that that it’s very, very hard, but I highly recommend it because you end up as yourself.
Debbie Millman:
well, three years later, you married Richard McDermott, a 34-year-old bartender who convinced you to enter rehab, and you said that putting down the bottle and the drugs was the hardest thing you ever did. And at 23, you were sober, totally broke, and with nothing with which to self-medicate. You lived in the fourth floor walk-up on Christopher Street. I lived in the fourth floor walk-up on 16th Street, by the way.
V:
Really?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You sold Avon to drag queens in the neighborhood and taught writing in Harlem at a school for pregnant girls. Then you got pregnant, but you had a miscarriage. How were you managing? How were you living day to day?
V:
I was the most anxious, crazy person. Fortunately, there was a 12-step program. I meagerly put my money together, and I had a therapist, but I was so anxious. I’ll tell you, one of the things that happened shortly after that is that my ex-husband’s son came into my life.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, Mark Anthony McDermott.
V:
He was 15. He was the most precious, just extraordinary being. I related to him so deeply because he had also been through the most challenging, the most devastating and abusive childhood. He had witnessed his own mother be murdered in front of him when he was 5 and carried out, and then not for a year that she was dead. So, he had not lived with his father.
When I met him, I just knew that he had to be part of my life, and that if we were all … If I was going to move him with his father, he was part of that deal. I have no idea why I knew that at 23, why I insisted he had to be with us, but if I could love him, I might figure out how to save myself by loving him.
In many ways, that’s what happened. I had to grow up for him. I had to be not crazy for him. I had to be not anxious for him. I had to take care of him. I just loved him so much. He was so dear and so talented.
I said two things to him: “You have to go to therapy and you have to go to acting school,” and it was like, “What is that?” He went to both. He became a really, really extraordinary person. Look, his struggle’s been a deep, deep, deep, deep struggle. Nobody who witnesses a mother be murdered … that’s a big one in the psyche. That’s powerful stuff. It’s a lot to overcome.
Debbie Millman:
After your miscarriage, Mark changed his name to the name you were planning for your own baby, Dylan. Dylan ultimately did go to therapy and did go to acting school, and he became a really famous actor.
V:
He did.
Debbie Millman:
In the 1980s, he introduced you to his acting teaching at Manhattan’s Neighborhood Playhouse, who happened to be the Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress Joanne Woodward. In 1987, Joanne directed Shirley Knight in a production of your play The Depot. What was that like for you?
V:
Oh, God! It was amazing. I just want to say Shirley died last month, and it’s been really hard, really hard. She was so brilliant. You know what it was like? It was like being raised by the two greatest divas in American theater. That’s what it was like. It was this unbelievable fortune that came to me. Joanne was the most nurturing, but she was also strict. She was also rigorous.
I remember I handed in the first draft of the play, and I was so terrified. I was so nauseous. She called me, and then she said, “The character is good, the setting is good. You’ve got the dialog, but it’s not funny. It has to be funny. I want it funny.”
I was like, “It’s a play about nuclear war.”
She said, “You’re funny. Make it funny.”
It was such a teaching because I did make it funny. By the time we finished touring that play all around America, at the Kennedy Center, everywhere, it was a comedy, but the message of working to build towards nuclear disarmament and stopping the arms race and reversing our course was coming through that. So, people were getting the message without me banging them over the head. The tourism just taught me so much. That was my training ground. That was my beginning. They stood by me, and they pushed me, and they loved me into being a playwright.
Debbie Millman:
At that point in your life, you’ve written that you had no reference point for your body. As a result, this is when you began to ask other women about their bodies, and in particular, their vaginas, as you sensed that vaginas were important. This led you to writing The Vagina Monologues, which was first performed in the basement of the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village in 1996.
What made you think at the time that that topic was a worthy subject at a play? As an aside, I do wonder if you had gone to Yale, what they would have thought of you writing a play with that topic?
V:
Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think it would have been like, “Oh, goody!”
Debbie Millman:
“Vaginas. Yay!”
V:
It’s like people always say, “What country did you go to that they were happy about the play?”
I was like, “There’s never been a country that the play went to where they were like, ‘Oh, yummy! The vaginas are here,’ and it’s never happened.” Never. I was interested. One of the things I’ve always believed is that if you follow your own curiosity, if you follow your own bliss, if you follow what interests you, what you care about, you will write the best thing. So, I was interested in what women thought about their vaginas, and everything that women said to me was so surprising, so startling, so amazing, so shocking, so funny.
I remember the first woman I ever talked to, I said, “Well, do you ever talk it?”
She said, “Well, my mother used to tell me, ‘Don’t wear underpants underneath your pajamas. You need to air out your pussycat.’”
I thought, Oh my God! Oh my God!
It was like that. Every person had something wild like that to say, and I thought, This is amazing. I feel like Pandora’s box, literally, we’re opening it up, and these stories that no one had told anyone before … and what was particularly amazing is when I first started doing this show here downtown, women would line up after the show, literally line up to tell me their stories. Like, they had to tell me.
It got to the point that literally I was inviting women over to my apartment. I felt like Dr. Ruth. Hours of the day, women were … part of it was I just wanted to give women an opportunity to tell someone their story, because they needed to tell their story, and a lot of it, unfortunately, was about sexual abuse. A lot of it.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. For anybody that’s seen The Vagina Monologues, you also then begin to have a story about saying “The Vagina Monologues.” It’s a bit meta, but I think it’s really universal. Since 1996, the play has been translated into 48 languages. It’s been performed in over 140 countries, including sold-out runs at Broadway’s West Side Theater and London’s West End. You won a Tony, you won an Obie. The play ran for over 10 years in the UK, Mexico and France.
In 2006, The New York Times called The Vagina Monologues the most important piece of political theater of the last decade. Celebrities who have starred in it include Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Idina Menzel, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Cyndi Lauper, Sandra Oh, Oprah Winfrey, Gillian Anderson, many others. I’ve seen the show twice, once with you performing the piece in its entirety, and one starring Alanis Morissette. What was it like at that time for you to become suddenly so successful?
V:
It was shocking. It was just shocking. I mean, first of all, if you had said “what would be the piece that will bring you success?” it would never have been in my wildest imagination The Vagina Monologues. But what was really, really exciting about it was the beginning of the building of this amazing movement and community of women.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
V:
That was so wildly exciting. The first V Day we ever did, which was at the Hammerstein Ballroom, which seats 2,500 people, I had invited all these amazing actors to perform it, and no one had done it at that point. Marisa Tomei had come to see me perform it with Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, if you can imagine.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
V:
OK. I went to her first because she had seen it, and she said “Yes.” Once I had Marisa, then I could go to the next person and say, “But Marisa Tomei is doing it,” and they’re like, “Really? All right. I’ll do it.” Then I’d say, “But Marisa Tomei and Whoopi Goldberg are doing it,” and it grew and grew and grew.
The night we performed it, OK, it was totally … just imagine this in the ’90s. Totally packed, 2,500 people. Boy George was there. It was just like the wildest scene you’ve ever seen. None of those women had ever said vagina publicly, had ever done anything like that. So, everyone was like vomiting, and just completely freaked out backstage. Every time one woman would go out and do her monologue, everyone would be watching on this monitor. They all hold hands. They’d all scream and yell, and they’d … it was the most beautiful sisterhood of support, of love.
I’ll never forget Glenn, who I love so much. I had asked her to do the “reclaiming cunt” piece because it was really about taking that word back. Of course, she was like, “What? Are you crazy? My mother will never talk to me.” She hung up the phone and she called me back two weeks later and she said, “I really get it.”
I said, “I just want you to go out there with little glasses being all WASPy, and by the end of it, I just want you to …” She did.
Debbie Millman:
She did.
V:
When she nipped open that word, and by the end, the entire 2,500 people were screaming, “God!” It was like the roof of that theater blew off that night. It blew off. To me, it was the beginning of the movement to end violence against women and girls. Now, there had been many women, of course, working on it before me, and we’re always in a line and a chain of sister after sister supporting sister, right?
Our movement goes back to African American women who were fighting slavery, right? It goes back to that’s when that movement began, and then there’s each stage of our movement, and now we’ve moved into Me Too, but to be in that movement for that chunk of year doing the play, spreading the play, getting women to share their stories, talk about their stories, break the silence … it was glorious. It was beyond the dream. I don’t even know that I could have had that dream.
Debbie Millman:
You founded your nonprofit. You mentioned V Day after The Vagina Monologues debuted. This effort, as well as your subsequent effort with One Billion Rising, you’re building the City of Joy in the Congo. It’s been a force in the global fight against gender violence. Yes, there have been other movements, and we hope that there’ll be a time when we don’t need these movements, but you have done more than most. You’ve raised over $100 million to help eradicate sexual violence. You’ve helped lead the conversation and educate millions of people about this topics. You’ve empowered women all over the world. What made you decide to go to the Congo?
V:
Well, I had been in Bosnia. I had been in Kosovo. I’ve been in Haiti. I’ve been in Afghanistan. I’ve been in war zones where women were being systematically raped as a tactic of war. I was really obsessed with it, to be honest with you, because I could see the pattern spreading as a tactic to destroy women all over the world.
What happened was the UN, someone from the UN called me, and asked me if I would interview Dr. Denis Mukwege. I was so shocked that anyone from the UN was calling me. I actually didn’t want to do it because we were already working in Afghanistan, in Bosnia and Haiti, and all these places. We just didn’t have the bandwidth.
Then I read his résumé, and I was so moved by what he was doing as a gynecologist, what the fight he was in the midst of, that I agreed to interview him. It turned out to be this amazing interview at New York Law School for 500 people. When you meet someone and you feel like they are on some level of transcendent radiance, and the work they’re doing is so mind-blowing … I mean, his eyes were literally bloodshot from all the horrors he had been seeing.
He just said to me at the end of the interview, “Would you come? Would you help us? You’re the only person I know who’s talking about vaginas, and I’m trying to talk about what’s happening to the vaginas of women in Congo. If you could come, if you could be with us, maybe you could help bring the word out. Just could you come?”
So, I did. I have to say that trip to the Congo, the trip to Panzi Hospital, what I saw there was, it was just the most devastating, shocking intersectional reality of racism, colonialism, capitalism, sexism merging in this horrifying caldron, and all of it was being enacted on the bodies of women.
There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women in the hospital, all of whom had been raped. All of whom were leaking. All of whose bodies were destroyed from rape. He was there by himself trying to figure out what to do. I don’t know. I can honestly say I think my brain was shattered. There was a shattering. It was a beginning of another whole, I would say, stage of my life.
I mean, Dr. Mukwege has gone on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and Christine Schuler Deschryver, who is the most extraordinary activist leader woman who I met when I went there, we all became, three of us became, very, very close, and decided that we would create this place called the City of Joy. It’s been one of the most beautiful, beautiful experiences of my life. It’s truly turning pain to power. It’s a place of radiance.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that inside the stories of the unspeakable violence, inside the women of the Congo, was a determination and a life force you had never witnessed. For our listeners that might not be aware, can you talk a little bit about City of Joy and what it is, and how it came to be?
V:
Well, the City of Joy is in Bukavu, which is Eastern Congo, where most of the conflict has been. We opened it 10 years ago. Christine and I spent weeks and weeks going everywhere asking the women what they wanted. What they wanted was a place where they could heal, where they could transform, where they could learn, where they could become leaders. So, it became our desire to build a place called City of Joy, where the women could literally turn their pain to power, and it hosts 90 women for six months at a time. Everything is paid for—their food, their comfort, their healing. They go through an incredible program of therapy through art, through theater, through dance, through music and through basic therapy, but it’s all group therapy because all healing is done in community.
They learn their rights. They learn permaculture. They learn self-defense. They go from being victims to survivors to leaders over the course of those six months. We were able to get this amazing land. So, we have 350 hectares called V World Farm, where women then go afterwards to become permacultural farmers, and they learn how to really be the best kind of farmers in their own communities. Some stay at the farm. Many go back to their communities, where we help them buy and purchase land, where they then begin their own collectives in their communities with other women who graduate from City of Joy.
They then begin to create these farming communities and they become leaders in their community where they bring the skills and the teachings that they’ve learned at City of Joy, and where they vet other women who they can send to City of Joy. So, it’s this very, very eco-friendly system of people who graduate bringing other people in who bring other people in, and it’s sisterhood passing on to sisterhood.
We’ve now graduated, I think, 1,400 women, and it’s unbelievable. The women are just doing so well. They’ve become leaders. They run collectives. They’ve become nurses. They’ve become doctors. They’ve become … what I’m most proud of is City of Joy is owned by the Congo leads. It’s run by the Congo leads. There are no outsiders who work there. They have professionalized an entire staff. It’s theirs. It’s completely theirs.
Our work on this side of the water is to find the money to keep them going, but it’s been one of the most beautiful, beautiful, beautiful projects. I think now, after these years, we’re ready to start to see whether we can start developing more City of Joys in other parts of the world.
Debbie Millman:
V, I mean, talk about a purpose in life. What have the women of the Congo and the work that you’ve done there taught you?
V:
Wow. Well, first of all, they saved my life, OK? Because when we were opening the City of Joy, right around the time we were supposed to open it, I got diagnosed with Stage 3/4 uterine cancer. I came very close to dying. I had seven organs removed. My body rearranged. I went through nine months of utter upheaval, chemo and infections. I had made a promise that we would open City of Joy.
So, Christine and I, literally, we joke about this all the time. She was having nightmares in the Congo because there’s no water, there’s no electricity, there’s no road, there’s no infrastructure. I was dying, but we would get on the phone and I would say, “Everything’s great. Money is coming along.”
She would get on the phone and she would say, “Everything’s great.” We would just lie to each other. Literally, our lies kept us going. But what have they taught me? There’s a woman at City of Joy that I want to talk about because she is my Bodhisattva. She teaches me everything I need to know about life. She has blessed me with being able to tell her story. She wants me to tell her story. Her name is Jane. She changed her name, too.
She had suffered unbelievable pain in the Congo. She had been taken. She had been raped very, very badly multiple times. She went to Panzi Hospital. She was there for years, where they did many, many surgeries. She went back, and then she was re-re-raped.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my God!
V:
The second time she was raped, they tied her to a tree for a month. Basically, she had a baby in that time. The baby died inside her. Her body was destroyed. Her story is in the film City of Joy. By the time she was brought to City of Joy Hospital, her body was in a basket. It was completely poisoned. It was destroyed. Dr. Mukwege always says, “There’s just no reason she lived except that her spirit is on such a high level of consciousness.” And she was one of the people who guided us in saying that they wanted a City of Joy.
She was in the first class of City of Joy and has become one of the greatest leaders at City of Joy. Her spirit and her brilliance and her vision and her intensity and her force of love that pours out of that woman is one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen in my life.
What she’s taught me is that there is a grace that can come, there is a vitality that can come from our suffering when we turn it towards love, when we turn it towards nurturing, when we turn it towards lifting up our sisters.
If you walk through City of Joy at any time of day, you will hear the most beautiful drumming, the most beautiful singing, the beautiful dancing. There’s this spirit there that it just feels holy. It feels from some other dimension, and it’s healing, it’s healing. Whatever that energy is, it’s the force of women who have turned their suffering into medicine. They’ve taught me that it’s possible.
Debbie Millman:
It helps make one’s life make sense.
V:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
In 2004, you published The Good Body, which you’ve described as an account of your own tortured relationship with your body. You declared that the pattern of the perfect body has been programmed into women since birth, and go on to state that what is far more frightening than narcissism is the zeal for self-mutilation that is spreading and infecting the world. I’m wondering if you could read a short excerpt from the book about this.
V:
OK. “I have been to more than 40 countries in the last six years. I’ve seen the rampant and insidious poisoning skin-lightening creams sell as fast as toothpaste in Africa and Asia. The mothers of 8-year-olds in America removed their daughter’s ribs so they will not have to worry about dieting. 5-year-olds in Manhattan do strict [inaudible] so they won’t embarrass their parents in public by being chubby. Girls vomit and starve themselves in China and Fiji and everywhere. Korean women removed Asia from their eyelids. The list goes on and on.”
Debbie Millman:
It’s really quite extraordinary what’s happening on a global basis. I was in China last year and saw that women were not only trying to remove Asia from their eyelids, but they’re now also trying to change their noses and build bridges on their nose to have a more Westernized nose, and as well change their lips with all sorts of fillers, and it’s rather rampant and terrifying.
You wrote and performed this in 2004. As I was going through your work, I realized that in 2010, you published the book I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, which is a collection of original monologues about and for girls, inspiring them to take agency over their minds, their bodies, their hearts, their curiosities. It was a New York Times bestseller.
After The Good Body, I feel that it paints a much more optimistic future about the emotional strength of what today’s young women could be, and it’s the last excerpt I’m going to ask you to read if you wouldn’t mind. And it’s something that really made me hopeful, and I haven’t been feeling very hopeful lately. So, I wanted to share it with my listeners. It is an excerpt from I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World.
V:
“Dear emotional creature, you know who you are. I wrote this book because I believe in you. I believe in your authenticity, your uniqueness, your intensity, your wildness. I love the way you dye your hair purple or high cup your short skirt or blare your music while you lip sync every single memorized lyric. I love your restlessness and your hunger. You’re one of our greatest natural resources. You possess a necessary agency and energy that, if unleashed, could transform, inspir, and heal the world.
“I know we make you feel stupid, as if being a teenager meant you were temporarily deranged. We’ve come accustomed to muting you, judging you, discounting you, asking you, sometimes even forcing you to betray what you see and know and feel. You scare us. You remind us of what we’ve been forced to shut down or abandon in ourselves in order to fit. You ask us by your being to question, to wake up, to reperceive. Sometimes I think we tell you we are protecting you when really we are protecting ourselves from own feelings of self-betrayal and loss.
“Everyone seems to have a certain way they want you to be—your mother, father, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, boyfriends, fashion gurus, celebrities, girlfriends. In researching this book, I came upon a very disturbing statistic. 74% of you say you are under pressure to please everyone. I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it means to please, to please, to please, to embody the will of somebody other than yourself. To please the fashion setters, we starve ourselves. To please boys, we push ourselves when we aren’t ready. To please the popular girls, we end up acting mean to our best friends. To please our parents, we become insane overachievers.
“If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? What do you have to cut off in yourself in order to please others? I think the act of pleasing makes everything murky. We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We wait to be rescued. We forget what we know. We make everything OK rather than real. They teach you how to make yourselves less so everyone feels more comfortable. They teach you not to stand out. They get you to behave.
“I am older now. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respect. It has taken me so many years to be OK with being different, with being this alive, this intense. I just don’t want you to have to wait that long.”
Debbie Millman:
Thank you so much, V. Thank you so much. I love that piece of that book so much. 2010 was a very intense year for you. This is when this book came out. This was the year you’re working on the construction of City of Joy in the Congo. You were scheduled to open in May of 2010, but on March 17, 2010, you discovered you had a huge tumor in your uterus. Given that you had been talking about vaginas for your entire career and the actress Kathy Najimy declared that you had the world’s biggest breast ovaries, this particular disease feels really unfair, and not to in any way make light of it, but ironic.
You were diagnosed with Stage 3/4 uterine cancer, and went through nine months of brutal surgeries, illness, chemotherapy. You’ve said that in this time you touched death and it was the most powerful transformation of your life. I’m wondering if you can talk about how so.
V:
Well, I think up until this point in my life, even though there were moments during The Vagina Monologues where I felt I came into my vagina, and I felt … I don’t know that I was fully inhabiting my body. I think what happened when I woke up from that surgery, it was amazing. I had tubes coming out of every part of my body. I had bags. I was hooked up to machines. I had a scar down my entire torso, but it was the first time in my life that I was a body, that it was fully a body. I was totally a body.
That really began this nine-month journey with that disease of everyday dropping more into myself. To be honest with you, when you sit in a room and the doctor looks over at you and tells you basically that you have Stage 3/4 cancer, you die in that moment, right? There is a death that happens in your body.
I feel that even though I went through that whole process, you don’t know if you’re going to live. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You know what the odds are, and they’re not good. I think you touch into death in a way where you stop being afraid of it. You’re there. Then what begins to happen is you realize how much you want to be alive, and how beautiful life is, and how you want to actually live in your body and live fully in your life force, which has been muted, cut out, drained, destroyed by patriarchy, by violence, by all the things that have gone on in your lifetime to try to undermine and destroy you.
I actually feel that cancer was the spiritual alchemy that turned my life where it was meant to go. I don’t know that I could have done it without it because it had to level me in my body so that I finally just became body, if that makes sense, where I was no more than body.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Sometimes I think I’m just a head.
V:
Yes. No. Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
I totally get it.
V:
I had a therapist who used to say to me, “You’ve been coming here for four years. I never realized you had a body,” because everything is in your head, and it was like I wasn’t in my head. Everything was about my body, whether it was an infection where I lost 30 pounds, whether it was chemo where I had to deal with the heat, whether … it was just body, body, body. It was a transcendental experience. It was a shamanic experience. Chemo was an experience where I started to merge and become part of trees and part of the world in a way where I had never ever been a part of.
It opened the door to a whole … I mean, I moved to the woods. Me, who had lived in the city for 40 years, I moved to the woods. I had to be with trees. I had to be with river. I had to be with birds. I had to be with sky. I knew that something had been born in me that was different. I was a city girl who wore black and made jokes about woods.
Debbie Millman:
You sound like you’re describing me. Now, it took a while for you to really evolve to this place. You published a remarkable memoir about the experience, which is titled In the Body of the World. You published it in 2013. You said in the initial response to your illness that there was something not only passive, but somewhat downright suicidal about your early response to your cancer—resignation as if you were in a strange voyeur noting your body from a great distance. How did that change to being fully in your body occur? How did that happen?
V:
Well, I think most of that disembodied part was before I got diagnosed. I had been sick for quite some time before I actually went to check on it. I had all the signs of something very wrong with me. As a matter of fact, I mean, I’ll tell you this very funny thing. It’s not so funny with me in retrospect. I had been through menopause and I hadn’t bled for years. The night that Obama got nominated, I bled. The night he got elected, I bled.
So, I thought it was just some amazing connection to the transformation of what was going on in America. In fact, those were all the signs of uterine cancer. I didn’t treat it. I knew something was wrong in my gut that I was swollen. I didn’t treat it. I just looked at it from the distance because I had that kind of detachment from my body, right? I had this passive resignation about my body. I didn’t fight for my body.
It wasn’t until I got sick that that changed, that I came into this body. Now, I can tell you when something’s wrong. I know instantly because I lived in this body. I can feel, “Oh, I shouldn’t have eaten that,” or “That doesn’t work for me,” or “I’m too tired.” I never knew when I was tired. I was always driving myself. I was always pushing myself. I was always achieving, proving I wasn’t bad, proving I was good, proving … I was proving, proving, proving, proving.
It’s a surefire way to destroy your body. So, to land in your body, you go much slower, right? You have to pay attention. It’s a whole different rhythm. I have to say I love it.
Debbie Millman:
You stated that until that moment in your life you had never been brave enough to allow yourself to be afraid. Did that impact how you felt about needing to prove yourself?
V:
Oh, definitely. You know that tough veneer that we put up, that drive that we put up that doesn’t let us feel our fear, that even when we’re failing, we just keep pushing forward, that doesn’t take in. It’s an invulnerability, even though underneath it we’re horribly vulnerable.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
V:
Now, what I feel is that I’m vulnerable. We’re all vulnerable. We’re human beings in this planet Earth. We have no idea what we’re doing here.
Debbie Millman:
Now more than ever.
V:
Now more than ever. We look up at the stars and we’re in wonder, but we’re also, “Wow! What is this?” If we’re really open, if we’re really awake, if we’re really present, we’re vulnerable. I think that is the greatest joy right now of just living in that vulnerability, and not masking it, and not … it’s different than insecurity. It’s different than insecurity.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I am really working hard in trying to understand self-worth separate from productivity or achievement or that same notion of proving, proving, proving, proving. Roxane, my fiancé, has told me that every time I try to prove myself, I just raise the bar, so that I have to keep doing it again and again and again. It’s been an interesting realization.
V:
The question is who are we proving ourselves to. One of the things living so deeply now with the Earth and the mother—because I really see the Earth now as my mother, my real, true mother—I’m just overwhelmed by her generosity, just her overflowing generosity. All of the things that she’s making and creating every minute, every hour … the new flowers that come up. Today is orange tiger lilies. Yesterday, it was white daisies. The day before was peonies, these creations.
What I realized, it’s such a different model to live not in proving oneself but to live in generosity, to live in what can we give, what can we show up with, what can we offer, what can we create, what we can make better? As opposed to, “Look at me. Look at me. Aren’t I doing it? Aren’t I proving it? Aren’t I making it?” Because that’s what these capitalist patriarchs have indoctrinated into us, and it’s made us all sick, and it’s pushed us past ourselves and it’s revving up our engine to the point where we’re burning ourselves out.
I want to live in the generous model. I want to live in the how can we nurture, how can we create, how can we take care of, how can we lift each other up, how can we make sure we all have what we need? That to me is much more interesting and it feels so much better than driving, the driving.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. Well, you’re now cancer-free. You’ve also performed In the Body of the World as a one-woman show. Here we are now, one year after publishing your most recent book, The Apology, which we talked about at the top of the show. I read that after completing the book, you stopped feeling any bitterness towards your father, and I’m wondering if a year later you still feel that way.
V:
I do. I do. I think the book was a true exorcism of sorts. At the end of the book, there’s a line where my father, or I, or my father and I, say together, “Old man be gone.” At that moment, it was like the end of Peter Pan when Tinkerbell just goes into the aethers. My father, same thing. He went and he has not been back.
I feel I have no anger, I have no bitterness. I got clean. I got clean with him. What was really clear to me is that I also didn’t want his name and I didn’t want the name that he would give me or that he gave me. I wanted my name. I wanted the rest of my life to be in my energy, to be with my own trajectory and not clouded or undermined by his story. It’s really funny. I make a joke like, I’m down to a letter and soon I’ll be nothing.
Debbie Millman:
No.
V:
It’s how I feel. I feel so much of what I learned during the cancer time or what I’m learning is how do we keep moving towards that radiant nothing, right? That radiant thing where we are just molecules that pass through us, and where we’re off service, where we’re off love, but we don’t get ourselves caught in the middle there. It just feels great to be V. It’s traveling light. I feel I don’t need a suitcase.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to choose the letter ‘V’ as opposed to ‘E’ or any other?
V:
I just love ‘V’s. I love everything about them. I love the shape of them, first of all, because they feel like conduits. They’re openings, and they’re invitations, right? I feel, obviously, vaginas, vonis, vulnerable, voluptuous, vulva, virtuous. I just love words that begin with ‘V’s, but I also feel that there is something so deeply archaically feminine about ‘V’s, that they are about compassion, they are about connection, they are about openings, they’re about the strength of vulnerability, the strength of vulnerability, the power of vulnerability. I think it’s an aspiration, right? V is an aspiration. It’s who I want to be. I like the idea that my name is calling me to be better.
Debbie Millman:
The last thing I want to ask you about is love, which also has a V in it. You said that you find that you are much more loving when you have not made arrangements about how you will love. I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit more about that. It’s almost like you figured out how to love.
V:
Such a good question, and no one ever asked me about it, Deb, so I appreciate it. I think if I’m anything, I’m pansexual. I have always loved women. I’ve always loved men. I can never really decide which. I never was made for monogamy. Just was never right for me. It was a system that just canceled me out, and I could never be faithful to it because my sexuality was what it was.
I don’t think I do that well. I mean, all people who do really well in relationships, right? I love my aloneness. I love my solitude. I love my privacy. I love visits, another ‘V’ word.
When I was recovering from my cancer, I went to Carola and I went to an Ayurvedic retreat. I worked with this amazing doctor who really helped me heal with the oils. At the end of it, he told me, he said, “Do not be in a relationship again in your life.”
Debbie Millman:
Interesting.
V:
“You need to now just evolve and go to the next layer of consciousness. Have paramores, have visits, have wonderful lovers, but keep your freedom. Your freedom is crucial to where you need to go now in your life.”
When he said it, there was both this complete liberation and a little bit of heartbreak because I knew it was true. Do you know what I mean?
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
V:
That’s where I am now. I closed the door on nothing, but the years of my life when I’ve been in this state have been the happiest years of my life. I also am a huge believer in friendship, and I have the most amazing women friends on the planet. Those women friends for me are the great loves of my life. I’ve had those friends for years, and I think we don’t make enough of the friendship between women.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
V:
How those friendships save our life, lift our life, make our life. I’m so happy I have time for those relationships now.
Debbie Millman:
V, I want to end the show with a quote from In the Body of the World. The reason I want to read it is because I really want to dedicate it to anyone that has ever been robbed of their dignity or their agency or their body. So, these are words written by V from In the Body of the World.
“Those of you who can be naked without a bank account, a known future or even a place to call home, those of you who can live without and find your meaning here, here, wherever here is, knowing the only destination is change, the only port is where we are going. The second wind may take what you think you need or want the most, and what you lost, and how you lost it will determine if you survive.”
V, thank you for being such a brilliant, badass agent of change, force of nature. Thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
V:
Oh, thank you, Deb. This has been a wonderful talk. I just so appreciate the depth and care and consideration and love you put into everything you do. Really amazing.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Oh, thank you.
V:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
That means so much to me. Thank you. Goosebumps. V’s latest book is called The Apology, and you can see more about all of V’s work on her website at eveensler.org. This is the 16th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, and we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.