Author(s): Annie Ernaux

Essays, Language & Writing | Staff Reviews

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.

STAFF REVIEW

Annie Ernaux is a French memoirist who writes about life's most intimate and painful moments with cool restraint and utter frankness.

'Happening', which recounts her illegal abortion in 1963, took my breath away and I've devoured her books ever since.

—Eliza from Brunswick Street Bookstore