Ensler was born in a middle-class suburb of New York 60 years ago, to a rather glacial housewife and a domineering corporate executive who began abusing her when she was a few years old. Her mother never intervened, and her younger sister witnessed the violence helplessly. As soon as she was old enough to leave home, Ensler took a lot of class-A drugs, had a lot of promiscuous sex, became an alcoholic, lived in communes and numbed her way through her 20s until she met her husband. She cleaned up, worked with homeless women, campaigned against nuclear weapons, got divorced in her mid-30s and became a small-time playwright on the beatnik downtown New York scene, until, at 43, she wrote the Vagina Monologues and the sexual violence of her childhood became the motor of her existence.