Happening
June 11, 2025 — Annie Ernaux
Review
Yet another Ernaux work that I simply could not put down once it was before my eyes. What is it like to write in this way, so utterly vulnerable? I wonder if anything in this style, from someone else, rings hollow by comparison. Just absolutely frustrating to read something so good.
Of course, it is also frustrating that a book like this can and must be written. The contexts leading to its creation are socio-religious dominance that criminalized abortion in France. Written in ‘99, Ernaux frequently interrupts her tale with parentheticals, reflecting on her recollection of events some 30 years later. It all seems so far away and also like yesterday:
(As I am writing this, I learn that a bunch of Kosovan refugees are trying to enter Britain illegally via Calais. The smugglers are charging vast sums of money and some of them disappear before the crossing. Yet nothing will stop the Kosovans or any other poverty-stricken emigrants from fleeting their native country: it’s their sole means of survival. Today smugglers are vilified and pursued like abortionists were thirty years ago. No one questions the laws and the world order that condone their existence. Yet surely, among those who trade in refugees, as among those who once traded in foetuses, there must be some sense of honour.)page 56.
A few years after the events of Ernaux’s life as depicted, in 1975, France’s abortion laws were liberalized and access became legal, sort of. Following the work of Simone Veil, France adopted a system by which women could receive abortions in the first ten weeks of pregnancy, and even this extremely limited act was designed to pass away after 5 years (though, it would become permanent). Not until 2024, in response to the United States regression on already imperiled abortion access, did France encode the right to a safe abortion into their constitution.
All of that is history. And yet, it isn’t, because history is living and codes and constitutions are mere documents and not inalienable. Progress is not a thing that, once accomplished, is set in stone. No fight is ever over.
The interactions with the doctors really blew me away. They are captured so well:
I begged him not to let me die. ‘Look at me! Promise me you’ll never do it again! Never!’ Because of his wild expression, I believed he might actually let me die if I didn’t promise. … He asked me to pay for the consultation. I was incapable of standing up so he opened the drawer of my desk and helped himself from my purse.page 62-63
Imagine, Ernaux in this scene is on the floor having just passed her fetus. She is hemorrhaging blood. She is a young student on the floor of her student housing unit. All this person did was show up and tell her to go to a hospital, and he helps himself to her money, going to dig through her desk and purse for it. Outrageous! One should be filled with anger, reading that a person was subjected to this for the mere exercising of control over their own body.
—
I found myself drawn to Ernaux’s parantheticals from the time of writing. We need not wonder why she wrote x or y because she clearly documents her thinking:
page 32:
(I feel that this narrative is dragging me along in a direction I have not chosen, proceeding along the inescapable road of fatality. I must resist the urge to rush through these days and weeks, and attempt to convey the unbearable sluggishness of that period as well as the feeling of numbness that characterizes dreams, resorting to all the means at my disposal – attention to detail, use of a descriptive past tense, analysis of events.)page 37:
(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 the patriarchy.)(TB: emphasis mine.)
page 47:
(I think I began this story because I wanted to follow the path leading up to those images of January ‘64, in the 17th arrondissement. Similarly, when I was fifteen, my whole life hinged on one or two images of me in the future: making love, travelling to faraway countries. I have no idea which words will come to me. I have no idea where my writing will take me. I would like to stall this moment and remain in a state of expectancy. Maybe I’m afraid that the act of writing will shatter this vision, just like sexual fantasies fade as soon as we have climaxed.)
These are compelling also because they give the impression that this is a pure stream of consciousness, and yet we know that it must be refined and crafted. It is too good not to be, right? Approximately 80 pages in my copy, written across eight months. I think there is a lot to learn from Ernaux’s work as someone who seeks to write truly and vulnerably, but threading the needle carefully so as not to simply make a book therapy. Writing can be therapeutic, but it shouldn’t be a dumping ground. We are so fortunate that Ernaux shares her skill and experience with us. And we can’t forget the brilliant translator (almost always Tanya Leslie, in this case) that brings Ernaux’s French into English, hopefully without loss.
Perhaps, one day when I suffer for having read all of Ernaux’s writing, I will start again and read the original French for these, and see what more there is to learn.
Notes
p32 - (I feel that this narrative is dragging me along in a direction I have not chosen, proceeding along the inescapable road of fatality. I must resist the urge to rush through these days and weeks, and attempt to convey the unbearable sluggishness of that period as well as the feeling of numbness that characterizes dreams, resorting to all the means at my disposal – attention to detail, use of a descriptive past tense, analysis of events.)
p37 - (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 the patriarchy.) (TB: emphasis mine.)
p47 - (I think I began this story because I wanted to follow the path leading up to those images of January ‘64, in the 17th arrondissement. Similarly, when I was fifteen, my whole life hinged on one or two images of me in the future: making love, travelling to faraway countries. I have no idea which words will come to me. I have no idea where my writing will take me. I would like to stall this moment and remain in a state of expectancy. Maybe I’m afraid that the act of writing will shatter this vision, just like sexual fantasies fade as soon as we have climaxed.)
p56 - (As I am writing this, I learn that a bunch of Kosovan refugees are trying to enter Britain illegally via Calais. The smugglers are charging vast sums of money and some of them disappear before the crossing. Yet nothing will stop the Kosovans or any other poverty-stricken emigrants from fleeting their native country: it’s their sole means of survival. Today smugglers are vilified and pursued like abortionists were thirty years ago. No one questions the laws and the world order that condone their existence. Yet surely, among those who trade in refugees, as among those who once traded in foetuses, there must be some sense of honour.) (TB: “As I am writing this” is February to October 1999, which contains part of the Kosovo War.)
p62-63 - I begged him not to let me die. ‘Look at me! Promise me you’ll never do it again! Never!’ Because of his wild expression, I believed he might actually let me die if I didn’t promise. … He asked me to pay for the consultation. I was incapable of standing up so he opened the drawer of my desk and helped himself from my purse. > > (Searching through my papers, I came across a description of this scene written a few months ago. I see that I had chosen exactly the same words, ‘might actually let me die…’ and so on. Whenever I think about my abortion in the bathroom, the same images invariably spring to mind: a bomb or a grenade erupting, the bung of a casket popping. My inability to use different words and this definitive coupling of past events with specific images barring all overs are no doubt proof that I truly experienced such events in this particular manner.)
p64 - …I surmised [another girl] was in her early twenties, unmarried. She had kept the child yet people were no kinder to her. Girls who abort and unwed mothers from working-class Rouen were handed the same treatment. In fact, they probably despised her even more.