49LITERATURE
2025, Vol. 22 (2), 49-60(194)
journals.uni-lj.si/elope
https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.22.2.49-60
UDC: 821.111(73).09-312.6Ensler E.
Martina Domines
University of Zagreb, Croatia
Traumatic Memory in Eve Ensler’s The Apology (2019)
ABSTRACT
Eve Ensler’s memoir The Apology (2019) traces Ensler’s growing up with an abusive father who 
raped her during her childhood and never apologized for the damage he caused. Ensler, now 
a successful woman in her sixties, thus imagines her father’s apology and details everything 
she was going through. Unlike Caruth’s theory of traumatic aporia where painful experiences 
are inherently contradictory and can never be grasped completely, Ensler’s act of writing the 
unspoken words of her father points to the fact that trauma can be healed through writing. As 
Richard McNelly and Joshua Pederson claim, it is precisely through writing that the victim 
can gain control over the act of recalling, helping the survivor to remake the self. Thus, in 
Ensler’s memoir, Caruth’s traumatic amnesia is replaced by the power of remembered and 
written detail to enact healing. This essay addresses issues of incest and rape through the lens 
of more recent trauma theory by paying attention to an imagined act of the perpetrator’s 
apology. By evoking pseudo memories, Ensler tries to understand her childhood trauma and 
how it affected her as a person. She establishes herself as a truth-teller and the survivor of 
intergenerational trauma with the ability to break the cycle of abuse, which is exactly what 
she does by writing The Apology.
Keywords: concept of time, memory, childhood trauma/pain, dissociation, art as a form of 
self-expression
Travmatični spomin v The Apology (2019) Eve Ensler
IZVLEČEK
Avtobiografija Eve Ensler The Apology (2019) opisuje njeno odraščanje z nasilnim očetom, ki 
jo je v otroštvu posilil in se nikoli ni opravičil za škodo, ki jo je povzročil. Zato si avtorica, zdaj 
uspešna ženska pri šestdesetih, predstavlja očetovo opravičilo, v katerem podrobno opisuje 
vse, kar je prestala. Za razliko od Caruthove teorije travmatične aporije, po kateri so boleče 
izkušnje v osnovi protislovne in jih ni mogoče v celoti dojeti, Eve Ensler z zapisovanjem 
neizrečenih besed svojega očeta pokaže, da je travmo mogoče pozdraviti s pisanjem. Kot 
trdita Richard McNelly in Joshua Pederson lahko žrtev prav z pisanjem pridobi nadzor nad 
spominjanjem, kar ji pomaga ponovno oblikovati svoje sebstvo. Tako v avtoričinih spominih 
Caruthovo travmatsko amnezijo nadomešča moč zapomnjenih in zapisanih podrobnosti, ki 
omogočajo ozdravitev. Ta esej obravnava vprašanja incesta in posilstva skozi prizmo novejše 
teorije travme, pri čemer se osredotoča na domišljijsko opravičilo storilca. Z vzbujanjem 
»psevdo« spominov poskuša avtorica razumeti svojo otroško travmo in kako je ta vplivala 
nanjo. S pisanjem knjige The Apology se avtorica vzpostavi kot vir resnice in kot žrtev travme, 
ki je sposobna prekiniti začarani krog zlorab.
Ključne besede: pojem časa, spomin, otroška travma/bolečina, disociacija, umetnost kot 
oblika izražanja sebe
50 Martina Domines Traumatic Memory in Eve Ensler’s The Apology (2019)
1 Introduction
Eve Ensler is an American playwright, feminist and activist who is best known for her 
extraordinary play The Vagina Monologues (1996) which she first performed off-Broadway 
as a one-woman show. She told an American journalist, Patt Mitchell (28 February, 2018), 
that she wanted to 
focus on Valentine’s Day as being a day that is safe and honoring and loving to women 
– and invite activists anywhere to perform The Vagina Monologues and whatever money 
they raise from the performance, stays in their communities supporting survivors. 
Within a year, V-Day was created with a bold mission: to end violence against women and 
girls globally. Ensler is also known as an activist for women’s rights in the aftermath of the 
wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kenya, and her related TED 
talks have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of viewers. Her activism for women’s rights 
is partly the consequence of betrayal and abuse she suffered as a little girl, something she 
writes about in The Apology (2019).
Her memoir traces the life of a girl who has to learn how to embrace herself after repeated 
sexual abuse by one of her closest family members. This little girl is Eve herself, and she 
recalls living with an abusive father who raped her from the age of five to the age of 16 and 
never apologized for the damage he caused. Therefore, she dedicates her memoir “to every 
woman still waiting for an apology”. For Ensler, the apology is a humbling act – it is “an act of 
intimacy and connection which requires great self-knowledge and insight” (2019, 9). Ensler 
knows that her father is long dead and he would never say these words to her. So the apology 
must be imagined in order to forgive her father and come to terms once and for all with the 
feelings of shame and guilt. She thus represents herself through the imagined eyes of her 
father, and her own memories are represented as her father’s. She imagines how he must have 
felt when she was born, when he held her in his arms for the first time and when he started 
abusing her. This essay aims to address the issues of incest and rape through the lens of recent 
trauma theory, recognizing the thin line between a traumatic identity and trauma culture.
Although scholars such as Roger Luckhurst have insisted that we live in a trauma culture 
where we are continuously exposed to traumatic events on TV and social media, thus 
participating in the “pathological public sphere”, there is still a lot of controversy about how 
traumatic experiences are being remembered. One of the crucial terms in trauma studies is 
the Derridean concept of aporia, which is about the process of bringing traumatic experiences 
to memory, often riven with an inherent contradiction. For Derrida aporia is “a blocking of 
passage, a stalling or hesitation, a foot hovering on the threshold, caught between advancing 
and falling back, between the possible and the impossible” (Derrida as qtd. in Luckhurst 
2008, 6). Trauma theory of the 1990s – with Cathy Caruth, Geoffrey Hartman and Dori 
Laub, to name just a few – relied on poststructuralist theory and embraced the Derridean 
concept of undecidability, or the inherent contradictoriness of the traumatic experience. In 
the words of Cathy Caruth (1995, 4–5): 
The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: 
the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in 
51LITERATURE
its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely 
to be possessed by an image or event. And thus the traumatic symptom cannot 
be interpreted, simply, as a distortion of reality, nor as the lending of unconscious 
meaning to a reality it wishes to ignore, nor as the repression of what once was wished.
Caruth thus posited that the force of traumatic experience arises precisely in the collapse of 
its understanding. Caruth and other early trauma theorists were trying to understand how 
traumatic memories work in the context of the Nazi atrocities, encompassed in the name 
of Auschwitz. In line with Adorno’s famous statement “To write poetry after Auschwitz is 
barbarous!”, Western culture is at once contaminated by and complicit with Auschwitz, and 
traumatic identity lies at the root of many collective identities. 
However, in the past 20 years poststructuralist trauma studies have been challenged by a 
number of authors claiming that the inability to speak about traumatic memories has to do 
with the wider cultural and social contexts of the victims. Thus, in 2003 Richard McNelly 
posited that trauma is both memorable and describable, and while “victims may choose 
not to speak of their traumas, there is little evidence that they cannot” (McNelly as qtd. in 
Pederson 2014, 334). Lucy Bond and Stef Craps further contend that traumatic memory is 
slippery and dynamic (2020, 5): “blurring the boundaries between mind and body, memory 
and forgetting, speech and silence. It traverses the internal and the external, the private and 
the public, the individual and the collective.”
While most trauma narratives represent the aporetic experience of trauma survivors, i.e. the 
undecidability and irrepresentability of the traumatic event, Ensler’s memoir is different in 
that it confronts the gaps and silences of past traumatic memories by filling them up in 
writing. For example, Toni Morrison in Beloved, Pat Barker in Regeneration Trilogy or Miriam 
Toews in Women Talking, to name just a few, have tried to imitate the silence, gaps, erasures 
or unspeakability of trauma through literary genres and devices. On the other hand, Ensler’s 
memoir purports to reveal all the details of her father’s sexual abuse in chronological order by 
filling in the gaps and voicing the silences. Ensler therefore believes in the representability of 
traumatic experience, and uses realist accounts of her father’s and her own lived experiences. 
She thus points to the intricacies of intergenerational trauma and proves that women should 
be trusted as truth-tellers and empathized with unconditionally.
2 The Personal as Intergenerational Trauma 
Contemporary trauma theory has had very little to say about the mind of the perpetrator. 
In Trauma and Recovery (1997), her study of traumatic experiences and their consequences, 
Judith Herman (1992, 54) remembers the legal scholar Hannah Arendt and the scandal when 
she reported that Adolf Eichmann, a man who committed unfathomable crimes against Jews, 
had been certified as normal by half a dozen psychiatrists: “The trouble with Eichmann was 
precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, 
that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Still, as most studies have shown, 
in the case of mass killings such as the Holocaust, when “normal” first-time perpetrators are 
encouraged to participate in mass violence, the experience of killing unarmed civilians “may 
be associated with terror and horror” (Maguen et al. 2009, 442 as qtd. in McGlothlin 2020, 
52
105) as well as with “physical disgust and moral abhorrence” (Munch-Jurišić 2014 as qtd. in 
McGlothlin 2020, 105) linked to traumatic stress. The perpetrators thus often suffer from 
PTSD in the aftermath of the atrocities they have committed. However, Evie’s father had 
no sense that what he had done was wrong, and this made him a monster with marked 
psychological pathologies. Such psychological pathologies he owed to his parents’ rejection of 
his authenticity,1 and at the beginning of her memoir Ensler reimagines her father’s childhood 
years to figure out where the seeds of his abnormality lay. She describes him as a lonely child 
who was adored by his mother (2019, 14):
From the time I was conscious, I was made to believe I was better, smarter, more 
precious, more deserving than anyone around me. What I didn’t know was why. I still 
don’t. […] I was my mother’s salvation. My mere existence would somehow resurrect 
her miserable marriage and redeem her suffering. I was light. I was darling. I was savior 
son. The idolized one is above you, beyond you. And so I was lonely. Excruciatingly 
lonely. The loneliness of the adored. […] And I was indeed an object.
His father was Austrian and his mother German. Both were raised with the severest discipline 
and followed the teachings of Dr Schreber, who believed that children should be taught 
to obey and refrain from crying. Any physical demonstrations of affection like embracing, 
cuddling, or kissing were to be avoided at all cost. Ensler first introduces the reader to her 
father’s childhood years as she is trying to explain to herself what forces contributed to his 
monstrous nature. Apart from his parents’ coldness, his brother abused him by putting drops 
of alcohol in his eyes, hiding red ants in his underwear and convincing him something was 
wrong with the shape and size of his genitals. He would lock him in the closet for hours 
and tie him to the bedposts until his wrists were raw. Ensler thus clearly points out that her 
father’s trauma was intergenerational – his parents were cold and severe, and his brother 
clearly abused him, while he was given no protection from any member of his family. He 
never knew what genuine love and affection looked like.
As much as her father, little Evie was suffering from “betrayal blindness” – Jennifer Freyd’s 
term used for children being blind to their parents’ abusive behaviour (2020). Children, 
Freyd claims, cannot process the information that their parents, who are supposed to protect 
them, have in fact betrayed them in a significant way. In a normal situation the betrayed 
person could confront the one in power or escape from them, but the child is in the situation 
of voluntary and necessary captivity where neither fight nor flight is possible. Children are 
dependent on their parents for love and support and, when abused by them, repress the 
traumatic experiences. Her father repressed his childhood abuse by becoming an abuser 
himself, while Ensler repressed the horrible experiences of her father’s rape and torture until 
1 One of the most influential readings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Barbara Johnson’s “My Monster/Myself” (1992), 
claims that the Creature’s monstrosity comes as the consequence of parental neglect and the rejection of the Creature’s 
authentic self. Reminiscent of the story of Oedipus whose parents cast him out to die, Victor Frankenstein suffers at 
the sight of his ugly creation, unaware that he is a kind and gentle soul, and is willing to let him die in the wilderness. 
The Creature is trying to establish contact with his life-giver but is repeatedly told that “there can be no community 
between me and you; we are enemies” (Chapter 10). Therefore, he turns into a serial killer, the perpetrator of the most 
atrocious crimes. 
Martina Domines Traumatic Memory in Eve Ensler’s The Apology (2019)
53LITERATURE
the age of 61, because repression is a form of motivated forgetting. Instead of becoming 
an abuser like her father, Ensler embarked on a path of healing through the writing of her 
memoir and the usage of pseudo memories as a healing device. In line with what Pederson 
and McNelly contend about the wider social context influencing the desire and the ability to 
speak about being abused, Ensler had to wait for the time to be right in order to tell her story 
(for her to be strong enough to be able to talk about it, and for the fourth wave of feminism 
to take place with other women’s open testimonies of sexual abuse). She thus proves that 
traumatic experience is never just a matter of the perpetrator’s psychopathology,2 but also of a 
wider patriarchal social discourse which views men as arbiters of truth and power. Her father 
was born in the late 1920s and grew up surrounded by images of Hollywood actors like Errol 
Flynn, Gary Cooper, and Rudolph Valentino, all of them strikingly handsome and charming. 
Suddenly he realized that a charming man could get away with any behaviour, and charm 
became his fortification. He tried to leave “the tortured man” of his childhood behind, but 
eventually he resurfaced (2019, 24):
I drank him away. But all the while, Shadow Man plotted, seethed and stewed. His 
sense of betrayal, his bitterness, his rage grew like volcanic lava bubbling beneath the 
surface of my skin. He would not emerge until much later. 
As Judith Herman confirmed in her numerous case studies, “the formation of a malignant 
negative identity is generally disguised by the socially conforming ‘false self ’” (1992, 80). It 
is obvious that Evie’s parents were both hiding their authentic selves behind a façade. From 
the outside, they looked like a happily married couple with three children, Evie being the 
eldest. It is difficult to say whether they were in love, but they were certainly embracing their 
marriage as a performance: everything looking fabulous on the outside, while actually being 
a total wreck on the inside (2019, 26):
We were two solo performers who joined our strength in a crowd-pleasing duet, 
Arthur and Chris. So when people later made constant reference to us as Cary Grant 
and Doris Day, we knew we had arrived. We were pure invention, confection. We 
existed only in performance, and in those early years, our act was working.
When Evie was growing up in the suburban environment of the 1950s United States, where 
patriarchal values were prevalent and her parents were playing out a “a perfect couple”, 
what happened within the home stayed within the home, so as not to jeopardize the public 
performance. It was a time when women were taught to look feminine and behave in feminine 
manner, to drop out of college and get married, to devote their lives to their families. It is 
2 With the advent of highly acclaimed series on Netflix such as Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (released 
September 19, 2024) about two brothers who shot their parents after being raped by their father and not protected by 
their mother, or Baby Reindeer (released April 11, 2024), in which a comedian is stalked by a woman, herself a victim 
of parental abuse, there has been an increasing interest in the psychology of the perpetrator. In both series human 
monstrosity happens as the direct consequence of parental abuse, and the viewers have access to the perpetrators’ 
memories of their own childhood abuse. Intergenerational trauma plays out in both series: Lyle and Erik Menendez’s 
father was emotionally, psychologically and sexually abused by his mother, while Martha, the woman who stalks 
Donny Dun, a Scottish comedian, was a neglected child who would often witness parental fights.
54
possible to imagine that Evie’s mother was caught up in this trap of being a “perfect wife and 
mother” with no desires of her own. As Betty Friedan explained in her essay “The Problem 
that has No Name” (1963), published around the same time when Evie was born, women 
were generally
taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets, 
physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, 
higher education, political rights – the independence and the opportunities that the 
old-fashioned feminists fought for. (1963, 3) 
Thus, in 1960s America, the happy American housewife was in fact anxious and depressed 
because she had given up on her purpose as an authentic human being with more to offer 
than being a good mother and wife. It is possible to imagine Evie’s mother being caught up in 
this patriarchal narrative which taught women that they have no purpose whatsoever beyond 
devotion to their household and servitude to their husbands. Her father was a CEO and her 
mother had been his secretary; Ensler imagines that their sex must have been “perfunctory, a 
performance too” (2019, 27).
Upon Evie’s birth, the Shadow Man woke up again, “his rapacious hunger charged with the 
fury of a thousand wild horses rushing the winds of their freedom” (2019, 30). But he waited 
until Evie was five years old when her limitless love and tenderness towards him became an 
intoxicant, feeding the 52-year-old Shadow Man inside him. This is when he started to make 
secret visits to her bedroom at night when “dream and memory are indecipherable” (2019, 
39). Thus, by exerting coercive control, the father becomes the most powerful person in Evie’s 
life until the age of 16 when she rebels for the first time and runs away from home. In The 
Body Keeps the Score, one of the staple works for poststructuralist approaches to trauma, Bessel 
Van Der Kolk asserts that “trauma is primarily remembered not as a story, a narrative with 
a beginning, middle and end, but as isolated sensory imprints: images, sounds, and physical 
sensations, that are accompanied by intense emotions, usually terror and helplessness” (2014, 
70). Instead, Ensler weaves a teleological narrative of progression where details are slowly 
revealed – the “motivated forgetting” of her earlier years is now transformed into an imagined 
memorizing of all the details of her father’s sexual abuse: first pretending to be her doctor 
and to soothe her to sleep by his inappropriate touches, and then violently raping her from 
the age of nine until one day, at the age of 16, she froze in bed like a possum protecting 
herself from a predator. That was the point when he stopped visiting her room at night, 
as he could not make love to her frozen, almost dead body. He was a paedophile but not a 
necrophiliac. Herman claims that such repeated abuse is “passively experienced as a dreaded 
but unavoidable fate and is accepted as an inevitable price of a relationship” (1992, 81). 
Later on, the survivor of such continuous abuse would have “profound deficiencies in self-
protection” (Herman 1992, 81) choosing abusive partners. Thus Ensler’s understanding of 
why she was suicidal in her early teens, why she ended up being in relationships where she 
would be the second best, why she enjoyed violent sex and why she struggled with alcohol 
and drug addiction, only comes in middle-age. Though she remembers only pieces of events, 
objects and fragments, her older-self is filling in the gaps of what her younger-self could not 
have understood.
Martina Domines Traumatic Memory in Eve Ensler’s The Apology (2019)
55LITERATURE
3 Women as Truth-Tellers
Memoir, as a type of autobiography, or the story of that part of a person’s life which was 
the most significant in building up their present self, presupposes an experience which is 
authentic and unique. Furthermore, it relies on the concept of intentionality – the writer 
talks about their life experiences with an honest intention, the intention of telling the truth. 
As early autobiographies from St Augustine to Rousseau have shown, to tell one’s truth 
means to engage the readers in the act of identification. Rousseau hopes to gain acceptance 
within his community by exposing all the events of his private life, as he believes that one’s 
truth has certain redemptive qualities. He will no longer be judged, but instead will be 
sympathized with. So, the early autobiographers participated in a representative structure 
in which one may stand for many. If on occasion they spoke about incidents and minor 
traumatic events, their lives were not affected by any serious traumatic experiences. On the 
other hand, the proliferation of traumatic experiences in the media today make it seem as 
though representing traumatic experience is easy, while it actually involves a paradox of 
intensified representativeness. As Gilmore (2001, 19) asserts, autobiography and trauma 
stand on opposite ends:
when self-representation and the representation of trauma coincide, the conflicting 
demands potentially make autobiography theoretically impossible: How can the 
exploration of trauma and the burden it imposes on memory be representative? How 
can the experience of a survivor of trauma stand for many? How can one tell the truth, 
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, when facts, truth and memory combine in 
the representation of trauma to undermine rather than strengthen representativeness?
Ensler’s The Apology shows how traumatic memories jeopardize the basic requirements of 
male/white/bourgeois Enlightenment autobiography in the sense that it does not ask the 
reader to identify with the narrative voice. Instead, she pleads for an empathic reader who 
would try to understand what she went through. Moreover, her intention to tell the truth is 
corroborated by the difficulty of representing traumatic experience. 
Although the history of masculine autobiographical accounts taught us to trust the male 
voice, in the face of narratives of sexual abuse, we must suspend that trust. Women are indeed 
truth-tellers to be trusted, but in a patriarchal society they are often seen as liars. Within such 
society women are seen as liars even by other women, and the male truth is still the most 
powerful one (2019, 68):
I was brought up in a time when men were praised for controlling and withholding 
their emotions. They were admired for their steely steadfastness and knowing the way. 
They never apologized. They never asked questions. They never explained. They never 
revealed their hand. They didn’t speak. […] I see now that this particular notion of 
manhood is highly questionable, as great violence is always required to preserve it. 
Sadly, as this passage is an imagined introspective reflection by her father, the real man would 
never come to terms with his toxic masculinity. From his childhood, tenderness and kind-
heartedness were mistaken for fragility and unmanliness. Furthermore, if Evie was betrayed 
56
by her father, she experienced another type of betrayal from her mother. She came from a 
poor, Midwestern household, and fashioned a personality based on studying divas in the 
movies. Her much older husband provided for the household and had an incredible charm, 
which made her admire him and never question his sanity. She was aware that American 
culture was based on a fantasy, and was willing to support the fantasy her husband had 
created. They travelled and dined in New York City’s most celebrated circles, but when alone 
had nothing to say to each other. When children came, they were just props for their evolving 
lifestyle. As Evie started having vaginal infections and changed her behaviour from a happy, 
extroverted child to a violent, introverted girl, her mother knew something was wrong yet 
did nothing to protect her. In Trauma and Recovery (1992), Judith Herman posits that the 
reenactment of traumatic scenes is most apparent in the repetitive play of children: “The 
everyday childhood is free and easy. It is bubbly and light-spirited, whereas the play that 
follows from trauma is grim and monotonous…As opposed to ordinary child’s play, post-
traumatic play is obsessively repeated” (1997, 28). Evie started avoiding play as the other 
children in school felt her internal horror (2019, 50): “Other children could smell your 
desperation and avoided you like the plague or teased and taunted you.” In one of her later 
interviews, Ensler said that she confronted her mother with the truth, and her mother told 
her that she had to sacrifice her – Eve – to keep peace in the house: she had two other 
children who could have been abused, too, if Eve ever stopped being her father’s “favourite”. 
In Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman (2001), Phyllis Chesler argues that in patriarchal societies, 
women always replace other women. In that sense, as daughters “we have replaced or are 
merely different from our mothers. Psychologically, daughters are unconsciously guilty about 
both facts” (2001, 173–74). In that sense, Evie is a scapegoat for the toxic dynamic between 
her parents, a sacrificial lamb denied a happy childhood so that her two siblings could grow 
up untainted by abuse. She is there to preserve family life as it appears on the outside – a 
masquerade of a happy, middle-class American family, living in the suburbs, with a spacious 
house and a car, great relationships with the neighbours, going on holidays and having 
interesting hobbies. We thus see that the abuse of women by men is woven into the broader 
narrative of systemic oppression which posits that the nuclear family should be preserved at 
all costs – even if it gives legitimacy to parental abuse.
When the father could no longer sexually abuse his daughter, he started battering her, and the 
family despised Evie instead of him for her “reckless” behaviour (2019, 42):
In that sense I set you up to be hated. And that would come to be part of what 
destroyed you. They couldn’t blame me. I was the husband. I was the father. They 
needed me. So they blamed you. You were the reason I was angry. You stole my heart. 
You banished them to darkness. Your name was Eve and you brought the fall onto the 
family. You were five.
These last words indicate the psychopathology of her father’s thinking that Ensler understands 
in the present moment: how could she have brought the fall upon the entire family at the 
fragile age of five? The narrative voice is continuously subverting the male voice as the truth-
teller: the more he stands firm in his cold, rational and possessive masculinity, the more we 
distrust him. 
Martina Domines Traumatic Memory in Eve Ensler’s The Apology (2019)
57LITERATURE
By placing herself in the perpetrator’s shoes, Ensler documents her father’s incestuous desires, 
which upon her first rejection turn into hatred and the withdrawal of all support. He will 
not congratulate her on the feminist speech which she gives in front of the entire college at 
graduation, and she will be the only one excluded from his will. Though Ensler’s experience 
seems to be deeply personal, nowadays we read the personal experiences of sexual abuse in a 
different way. In the aftermath of the #MeToo movement which started in 2006 when Tarana 
Burke spoke publicly about being sexually assaulted, we could say that Ensler’s The Apology 
shows the magnitude of this persistent, global issue. Ensler’s personal experience is easily 
recognized as an intergenerational, systemic and global problem.
4 Reading Narratives of Parental Sexual Abuse
This last point opens up the question of how we read accounts of traumatic experiences and 
how we handle the fact that the family and the community trust the perpetrator and distrust 
the victim. In The Cut, a psychology journal, Katie Heaney published an article (Heaney 
2021) about Jennifer Freyd’s parents’ reaction to their daughter accusing the father of sexual 
abuse. They discredited her by founding the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in 1992, 
accusing her of wanting to achieve fame on false grounds; the foundation was later dissolved 
in 2019, the year The Apology was published. Significantly, “false memory syndrome” has 
been promoted by motivated parties to discredit testimony by survivors, to pathologize 
memories of sexual abuse in children and to stigmatize therapies related to this abuse. Often, 
parents want their abused child to accept the “official” family narrative – as far as s/he is a 
dissident from the narrative of family normalcy and harmony. The question of who is to 
control the family narrative is thus a game of power where memory plays a crucial part. Are 
children allowed to remember and are we to believe them? Children should never be excluded 
from the family narrative. Though we are aware that at the heart of self-representation lies the 
process of self-construction, a mixture of memory and invention, Ensler shows that literary 
accounts of trauma are narratives of resistance and an important path to healing, where the 
reader plays a crucial role in this process. 
More than 50 years have passed since the publication of Georges Poulet’s seminal essay 
“Criticism and the Experience of Interiority” (1972), which suggested that the act of reading 
involves the coming together of two consciousnesses – the writer’s and the reader’s – when 
the reader can hardly explain “the facility with which I not only understand but even feel 
what I read” (1972, 60). In the years after this, structuralists and poststructuralists convinced 
us that the role of the reader is insignificant, with nothing to look for “outside the text”, to 
paraphrase Derrida. In the last decade, with the rise of affect theory, the role of the reader has 
been re-established and Poulet’s ideas resuscitated. For example, Dominick Lacapra warns us 
about the possibility of identification between the victim and the reader, in which “to confuse 
self and other, and collapse all distinctions” in the act of identification of self and victim is 
more dangerous than feeling empathy, which preserves a certain distance (LaCapra as qtd. in 
Luckhurst 2008, 4). Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth claim that “affect accumulates 
across both relatedness and interruptions in relatedness” (2010, 2), where the affected 
reader acquires in turn the capacity to affect. The affect plays a vital role in reading trauma 
narratives, and the reader can take various positions. Some of the possible readings of trauma 
58
narratives include: the symptomatic reading which embodies a reading effect that will in its 
turn emerge as a symptom (Rooney 2017, 127); the empathic reading as a response founded in 
empathy which involves “intellectual interest, active imagination, emotional investment” and 
– crucially – “ethical engagement” (Assmann 2018, 216) or the implicated reading, where the 
reader is a participant in a system that generates dispersed and unequal experiences of trauma 
and well-being simultaneously (Rothberg 2019, 12). In the symptomatic reading, Rooney 
underlines “the problem of form as an effect of reading” (2017, 129) where “the work of form 
entails the play on words, the rendering of form as reading’s effect” (2017, 135). Though, 
as we have already noted, the confessional style of The Apology is disparate from previous 
confessional narratives because it is voiced through Ensler’s father’s imagined voice, the reader 
trusts her intention to reveal her childhood traumas with truthfulness and sincerity. The 
symptomatic reading, which recognizes the confessional style as possibly suspect, thus turns 
into an empathic reading as the reader becomes emotionally invested in Ensler’s traumatic 
confession. Empathy is not identification, but this divide is constantly under threat of being 
overrun so the position of the reader is far from an easy one. The memoir is difficult to 
read for people who were victims of sexual abuse, for whom the identification with Ensler’s 
experiences might be triggering. Herman claims that “avoiding the traumatic memories leads 
to stagnation in the recovery process, while approaching them too precipitately leads to a 
fruitless and damaging reliving of the trauma” (1992, 125). It is possible that the reading of 
such a traumatic narrative causes intrusive symptoms in a survivor of sexual abuse, so it is 
essential to monitor the symptoms “so that the uncovering work remains within the realm of 
what is bearable.” (Herman 1992, 125). To a certain extent, Ensler is the emphatic reader/
writer of her own traumatic experience.
Writing thus becomes crucial in building up Ensler’s older self, and it enables her to find 
solace in her vulnerability. Her father will never show his vulnerability but at least she is able 
to imagine his apology, as a successful writer and activist in her sixties (2019, 112): 
Eve,
Let me say these words: I am sorry. I am sorry. Let me sit here at the final hour. Let me 
get it right this time. Let me be staggered by your tenderness. Let me risk fragility. Let 
me be rendered vulnerable. Let me be lost. Let me be still. Let me not occupy or oppress. 
Let me not conquer or destroy. Let me bathe in the rapture. Let me be the father.
Let me be the father who mirrors your kind-heartedness back to you. Let me lay no 
claims. Let me bear witness and not invade. 
Eve, I free you from the covenant. I revoke the lie. I lift the curse. Old man, be gone.
In line with Michael Rothberg’s idea of “an implicated subject”, all of us who are “participants 
in histories and social functions that generate the positions of victim and perpetrator” (2019, 
1) should feel partly guilty for the abuse of children in their families. Most of us do not 
play out clear-cut roles, but are still implicated in the crime simply by living in positions of 
power and privilege and pretending that sexual abuse would never happen in our household. 
However, an implicated reading of Ensler’s memoir gives us agency to spread her story and 
talk about the sexual abuse of children with the goal of creating conscious and empathetic 
community. 
Martina Domines Traumatic Memory in Eve Ensler’s The Apology (2019)
59LITERATURE
5 Conclusion
As Anne Whitehead noted, “[t]he rise of trauma theory has provided novelists with new 
ways of conceptualising trauma and has shifted attention away from the question of what is 
remembered of the past to how and why it is remembered” (2004, 3, as qtd. in Bond and 
Craps 2020, 5). Unlike Caruth’s theory of traumatic aporia – where painful experiences are 
inherently contradictory and can never be grasped completely – Ensler’s act of writing the 
unspoken words of her father points to the fact that trauma can be healed through imagining 
the perpetrator’s motives. As Joshua Pederson claims, it is precisely through writing that 
the victim can gain control over the act of recalling, helping the survivor to remake the 
damaged self. Thus, in Ensler’s memoir, Caruth’s traumatic amnesia is replaced by the power 
of remembered and written detail to enact healing through the perpetrator’s eyes. Thus 
Ensler’s memoir addresses the contradictory nature of traumatic memory, showing that the 
imagined Apology was needed for establishing peace, not with her father’s crime, but with 
herself. Furthermore, her exploration of parental abuse challenges patriarchal structures and 
gendered violence, as she shows that the abuse of women by men is woven into the broader 
narrative of systemic oppression.
The 21st century reader is definitely more inclined to sympathize with young Evie, the more so 
because she is a woman speaking her truth. Her personal experience is therefore empowering 
for many women who have been victims of sexual abuse and have been implicated in the 
collective trauma culture. Moreover, our position as implicated subjects (Rothberg 2019) 
gives us the opportunity to spread somebody else’s truth and actively engage in sharing and 
caring for the victims.
In one of her powerful TED Talks, which took place in India in 2009 (TED Talk: Embrace 
your inner girl 2010), Ensler introduced the term “‘girl cell” and explained it in the following 
manner:
I want you to imagine that the girl is a chip in the huge macrocosm of collective 
consciousness. […] And then I want you to imagine that this girl cell is compassion, 
and it’s empathy and it’s passion itself, and it’s vulnerability and it’s openness and it’s 
intensity and it’s association and it’s relationship and it is intuitive. And then let’s think 
how compassion informs wisdom and that vulnerability is our greatest strength, and 
that emotions have inherent logic which lead to radical, appropriate, saving action. 
And then, let’s remember that we’ve been taught the exact opposite by the powers that 
be, that compassion clouds your thinking, that it gets in the way, that vulnerability is 
weakness, that emotions are not to be trusted, and you’re not supposed to take things 
personally. I think the whole world has essentially been brought up not to be a girl. 
[…] I actually think that being a girl is so powerful that we’ve trained everybody not 
to be that.
By revealing the traumatic truth of her growing up, Ensler is trying to influence our collective 
consciousness: vulnerability is strength and being a girl is powerful. But even more than that, 
as empathetic and implicated readers, we owe our community to hear the stories of sexual 
abuse and act accordingly.
60
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