Happening

Annie Ernaux

Seven Stories Press, 2001 - Biography & Autobiography - 95 pages

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

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - AnthonyTFS - LibraryThing

Reading Annie Ernaux’s Happening. I am suspicious of its translation into English. Ernaux writes: “En regardent la silhouette frêle, en imperméable, du petit employé, ses humiliations, devant la ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - MSarki - LibraryThing

Not only an interesting story, but harrowing and unfair. I do appreciate Annie Ernaux, her honesty and courage, and her need to put her life into words so that others might benefit from how, and the way, she lived.

Contents

• Section 1: 7
• Section 2: 13
• Section 3: 22
• Section 4: 23
• Section 5: 37
• Section 6: 93

About the author

Born in 1940, ANNIE ERNAUX grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and began teaching high school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man's Place and A Woman's Story, have become contemporary classics in France. She won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place when it was first published in French in 1984. The English edition was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The English edition of A Woman's Story was a New York Times Notable Book.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Happening
• Author: Annie Ernaux
• Translated by: Tanya Leslie
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2001
• ISBN: 1583222561, 9781583222560
• Length: 95 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures