Charles Petzold

French author Annie Ernaux has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and since I didn’t know anything about her work, I ran up to The Strand and bought one of her books.

Happening was published in 2000. It is a memoir of her 23-year-old self during a few months in late 1963 and early 1964 when her period stopped. She quickly establishes that she is pregnant, and she is determined to get an abortion despite the procedure being illegal in France at that time.

This is an intense and taut narrative, just 95 pages long, and one in which every paragraph and sentence is tight and focused. Along with the narrative of her past, Ernaux struggles with her memory (aided by a diary she kept during the time) and the process of writing itself:

Throughout this story, time has been jerked into action and it is dragging me along with it. Now I know that I am determined to go through with this, whatever the cost, in the same way I was determined to go through with my abortion after tearing up the pregnancy certificate, aged 23.

She observes something interesting in her diary:

To convey my predicament, I never resorted to descriptive terms or expressions such as “I’m expecting,” “pregnant,” or “pregnancy.” They endorsed a future event that would never materialize. There was no point naming something that I was planning to get rid of.

While writing this memoir, she is determined to be honest and complete and omit no details. This won’t be like other stories of abortions:

Although abortion was mentioned in many novels, no details were given about what actually took place. There was a sort of void between the moment the girl learns she is pregnant and the moment it’s all over.

There is no void in Annie Ernaux’s narrative.

I realize this account may exasperate or repel some readers; it may also be branded as distasteful. I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled. There is no such thing as a lesser truth. Moreover, if I failed to go through with this undertaking, I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy.

Through periods of despondency and helplessness, consulting friends and doctors hoping to find someone to perform an illegal abortion, the 23-year-old finally has a lead of a woman and address in Paris:

Thousands of girls have climbed up stairs and knocked on a door answered by a woman who is a complete stranger, to whom they are about to entrust their stomach and their womb. And that woman, the only person who can rid them of their misfortune, would open the door, in an apron and patterned slippers, clutching a dish towel, and inquire, “Yes, Miss, can I help you?”

But Ernaux’s story doesn’t end there. Back in those days, abortions performed under such conditions were extraordinarily risky, and Ernaux’s courageous and harrowing memoir is relentless in letting us know exactly how risky it could be.