A haunting meditation on memory and trauma by the award-winning French memoiristMaybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, twenty-three and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame rises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep the child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. With no legal recourse to abortion, she attempts, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Desperate and in terrible pain, she finally locates 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.