Happening

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "Happeningrecounts what it was like to be a young woman whose life changed - and world ominously narrowed - in 1963 with an unwanted pregnancy. . . . It feels urgently of the moment." --The New York Times

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. 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.

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.

InHappening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.