Book description
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…
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Why read it?
1 author picked Happening as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
A friend who attended Honor Moore's event with me suggested a very different take on illegal abortion in the 2000 memoir, HAPPENING, by Nobel-prize-winner Annie Ernaux. Like Moore, Ernaux revisits an event from decades before, when she was 23 and abortion was illegal in France. (It's recently become a right enshrined in the French constitution!) It's a searing slip of book--76 spare pages--that packs a powerful punch. Shifting from the events of those days to her thoughts about them now, presented in parentheses, it's another indictment of barbaric laws that force women to seek dangerous help for procedures that should…
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