The Good Body, Eve Ensler
The Good Body, Eve Ensler
2 Rating(s)
List: $9.98 | Sale: $6.99
Club: $4.99

The Good Body

Author: Eve Ensler

Narrator: Eve Ensler

Unabridged: 1 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 11/09/2004


Synopsis

Botox, bulimia, breast implants: Eve Ensler, author of the international sensation The Vagina Monologues, is back, this time to rock our view of what it means to have a “good body.” “In the 1950s,” Eve writes, girls were “pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist-pinchers. . . . In recent years good girls join the army. They climb the corporate ladder. They go to the gym. . . . They wear painful pointy shoes. They don’t eat too much. They . . . don’t eat at all. They stay perfect. They stay thin. I could never be good.”

The Good Body starts with Eve’s tortured relationship with her own “post-forties” stomach and her skirmishes with everything from Ab Rollers to fad diets and fascistic trainers in an attempt get the “flabby badness” out. As Eve hungrily seeks self-acceptance, she is joined by the voices of women from L.A. to Kabul, whose obsessions are also laid bare: A young Latina candidly critiques her humiliating “spread,” a stubborn layer of fat that she calls “a second pair of thighs.” The wife of a plastic surgeon recounts being systematically reconstructed–inch by inch–by her “perfectionist” husband. An aging magazine executive, still haunted by her mother’s long-ago criticism, describes her desperate pursuit of youth as she relentlessly does sit-ups.

Along the way, Eve also introduces us to women who have found a hard-won peace with their bodies: an African mother who celebrates each individual body as signs of nature’s diversity; an Indian woman who transcends “treadmill mania” and delights in her plump cheeks and curves; and a veiled Afghani woman who is willing to risk imprisonment for a taste of ice cream. These are just a few of the inspiring stories woven through Eve’s global journey from obsession to enlightenment. Ultimately, these monologues become a personal wake-up call from Eve to love the “good bodies” we inhabit.

About The Author

Eve Ensler is an internationally acclaimed playwright whose many works for the stage include Floating Rhonda and the Glue Man, Lemonade, Necessary Targets, and The Vagina Monologues, for which she received an Obie Award. Performances of The Vagina Monologues, sponsored by V-Day (www.vday.org), have raised $25 million to stop violence against abused women and girls around the world. She lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Alice on March 14, 2009

Not as good as the Vagina Monologues, but still very powerful and funny and wonderful in its own way. My favorite moment of this book was reading it in an airport... My copy had a different cover from the one pictured here. The cover art is a naked female torso with scoops of ice cream instead of br......more

Goodreads review by Fadillah on January 25, 2023

Our body is the carrier of the stories of the world of the earth of the mother. Our body is the mother. Our body came from Mother. Our body is our home. We are crying here. We are found. We are women. We are too much. We are empty. We are full. We live in a good body. We live in the good body. Good body Good bod......more

Goodreads review by Ana on January 02, 2016

original read: 2008 I still remembered some parts of this. It was good.......more

Goodreads review by Paya on February 17, 2021

Waham się między 2,5 a 3... poziom samonienawiści w tej książce jest dołujący. I takie są nie tylko wypowiedzi Ensler na temat własnego ciała, ale też to, co inne kobiety mają do powiedzenia na temat swoich ciał. Wszystkie pozytywne wypowiedzi kobiet, które traktują swoje ciało z szacunkiem, albo pr......more

Goodreads review by Gen on January 11, 2019

I am deeply concerned about Eve and her relationship to food and her body. I was expecting to find something relatable here, but instead I find myself horrified by how disturbed her body image is and hoping she was either exaggerating for the art of it or getting some proper help.......more


Quotes

Praise for Eve Ensler:
“Eve Ensler can soar to Rabelaisian heights or move us with quiet compassion. . . . She may not save the world, but what other playwrights even think of trying?”
Time

Acclaim for The Vagina Monologues

“Spellbinding, funny, and almost unbearably moving . . . It is both a work of art and an incisive piece of cultural history, a poem and a polemic, a performance and a balm and a benediction.”
Variety

“The monologues are part of Eve Ensler’s crusade to wipe out the shame and embarrassment that many women still associate with their bodies or their sexuality. [They] are both a celebration of women’s sexuality and a condemnation of its violation.”
–The New York Times

“Women have entrusted Eve with their most intimate experiences. . . . I think readers, men as well as women, will emerge from these pages feeling more free within themselves–and about each other.”
–GLORIA STEINEM