In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a 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.
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This book was a beautifully written meditation on memory and the past. While obviously it also depicts Ernaux's experience with an abortion as a young woman, she also intertwines commentary of corporality, nostalgia, and writing. This is a very quick/short read, so I definitely recommend it!
Favorite quotes:
* I shall try to conjure up each of the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror or sweetness. (20%)
(writing invariably raises the issue of proof: apart from my engagement book and my diary, I have no sure indication of what I thought and felt back then because of the abstract, evanescent nature of what goest through our mind. the only concrete evidence i have stems from the lingering sensations associated with people and things outside of me — the sparkling snow at Le Mont-Dore, Jean T’s bulging eyes, the. ballad of Souer Sourire. True memory has to be material.) (58%)
* maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations, and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something unintelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people. (95%)
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