Happening by Annie Ernaux

genre: memoir

In 1963, Annie is a college student when she finds out she's pregnant.  This short and deeply poignant book is about her choice to pursue an abortion in a France where this procedure is illegal.  It is heartbreaking while at the same time gorgeously written.  The intimacy with which she shares her memories and then processes them as her present day adult-self is so powerful.   Her memories are heavy and disturbing.  Many readers would be willing to die on a hill claiming she had no right to do such a thing to her body.  And yet, Annie is a real person.  In a real life.  A real woman whose health care was illegal and who knew there was no other way for her to sanely more forward.  And her lived experience is both valid in and of itself but also as a window into the wider experience of women in every country in every time where they literally are damned if they keep the child and damned if they don't.  I wrote that exact phrase in the margins of this book twice.  To think about the other half of this experience, the father of the child who literally could just go live his happy male college life and let Annie deal with all of this herself makes my blood boil.  I do not judge her choice.  I was sickened by what was required and by the deep and dark trauma that resulted from it, but I do not judge her.

This book IS NOT for everyone.  It is upsetting and graphic.  It is also so very, very important and phenomenally translated from the original French.