Most readers know Eve Ensler best as the anti-violence activist and star of the feminist world-traveling production, The Vagina Monologues. She has followed this seminal play with other popular works, highlighting the difficulties of women surviving war (Necessary Targets), women’s endless scrutiny of physical imperfections (The Good Body), and even her own experiences of finding self-protection as a survivor of abuse (Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security Obsessed World).  In her latest book I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World, Ensler sets out to portray the thoughts, issues, and desires of adolescent girls today. 

With varying degrees of success, Ensler offers a broad spectrum of experiences that keep the reader engaged with the work, even as much of the language suggests an adult perspective of a teenager’s world.  This is not to say that Ensler portrays her subjects with insensitivity or condescension; as a reader, I believed in Ensler’s earnest hopes that the book is “a call to listen to the voice inside you that might want something different, that hears, that knows, the way only you can hear and know.  It’s a call to your original girl self, to your emotional creature self, to move at your speed, to walk with your step, to wear your color.”  But there’s something very trivializing about the voice of certain girls within the book, particularly Ensler’s uninspired perspective on the American suburban teen.  In “Let Me In,” the speaker obsesses over purple UGGs and whether there’s room for her at the popular kid’s table in the cafeteria.  The speaker comes off false, shrill, self-absorbed and petty.  Contrast that monologue with the girls of Bulgaria (“I Have 35 Minutes Before He Comes Looking for Me”) or Palestine (“Sky Sky Sky”), young women who engage with their environment, politics, families, and communities.  They are also poor, suffering, in desperate need of aid. This dichotomy establishes the class and race privilege of the white Western girl, sure, but it’s hardly empowering for the girl of color whose only shown in a victimized, one-dimensional point of view.

This is really the heart of my issue with Ensler.  As a famous, successful and established playwright, Ensler was in the perfect position to work with young women in writing and publishing THEIR monologues.  Yet Ensler only credits a V-Girls Advisory Circle.  Wouldn’t it have been better to let these young women from Palestine, China, Israel, Iran, France, and the U.S. write their own stories in their own authentic voices?  Much of this work feels like a co-optation of experience, a wasted opportunity to give voice to young women’s lives, despite the protestations of the author.

If readers are hoping to expand their ideas of what it means to be a teen girl in different parts of the world, this book won’t do much to expand the story.  Ensler’s intentions are noble, but like the voices of the young women portrayed in I Am An Emotional Creature, they are slightly off-the-mark.