In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant.
Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience..
In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days.
Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.
In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle.
This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame.
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.
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant
