Happening by Annie Ernaux

Paperback, 77 pages

Published February 13th 2019 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (first published March 14th 2000)

Original Title: L'évènement

Memoir / Library

 It was recommended at bookclub, and well it was short one! Just what I needed, I finished it in an hour.

It is the story of how she in the 60s tried to get an abortion. But it was illegal, and she tried and tried to find one. She even tried a knitting needle on herself, and then she went to some quack and later ended up in the hospital. And it was harrowing. 

It was a constant stream of memories without a break, and it turned out to be really interesting, and so very NOW.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In HAPPENING, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.