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[Book reviews]

‘The procedure’
Annie Ernaux’s history lesson

BY CLEA SIMON

Happening
By Annie Ernaux. Translated by Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories Press, 95 pages, $18.95.

We have become complacent. We too often talk of feminism and abortion rights as battles won. We dismiss our gains as givens and thus endanger the freedoms we have come to assume as our birthright.

Just in time, Annie Ernaux has sounded a clarion call with a short, sharp book that brings us back to a different but very recent reality. In Happening, the French memoirist quickly and concisely renders the story of her own back-alley abortion in Paris, 1964, when she was 23. In her telling, she is direct and candid, as completely unsentimental as she was then, when she saw her unwanted pregnancy as a problem to be solved. In 1964, the author was still working on her dissertation, and when she reached out among her network of progressive students and radical friends to find the service she needed, she found disillusionment, unexpected companionship, and more. Her recounting of that search, of her growing desperation, and of its harrowing but ultimately successful conclusion, is a story we would do well to remember. History is not that far away.

Happening clearly belongs in women’s-studies curricula, but it is more than a political document, a witness to an unbearable, ridiculous time. Like Susanna Kaysen’s new The Camera My Mother Gave Me, but vastly superior in its complete and compelling honesty, this is a crystalline memoir of a very specific, very female experience. With the aid of her own brief journal entries, Ernaux gives us history as gesture drawings, letting a few lines suggest complex emotional states. " I am pregnant. It’s a nightmare, " she quotes her diary’s only words after giving a more complete recounting of the confusing and frightening visit to the doctor who confirmed her state.

Again and again in her precise, delicate first-person prose (in a translation by Tanya Leslie), Ernaux brings us back to those turbulent student days, letting this intensely personal drama unfold as it happened. After approaching a married student colleague, a fellow radical who she had hoped would have information about abortion providers, she finds herself facing his unwanted advances. Despite her physical repulsion (she becomes nauseated), she excuses his attempt, explaining: " I don’t think that Jean T had shown contempt for me. In his mind, I had moved on from the type of girl who might say no to the type who had undoubtedly said yes. " In the same matter-of-fact language, she proceeds to inform her lover of her intention to seek an abortion. But this cool approach only heightens the urgency, the growing desperation of the underlying emotion implied when she notes, " One week later Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. By then I had lost interest in that sort of thing. "

Taken out of context, such quotes may sound thin. In this brief book, however, they build on one another, creating a full-blown reality that is almost too real, too horrible to stomach. When Ernaux obtains her abortion, a botched procedure that causes her to miscarry at home, the few details she shares are almost more than the reader can bear. There’s O, the friend who helps her that night: " We don’t know what to do with the foetus. O goes to her room to fetch an empty melba-toast wrapper and I slip it inside. . . . it feels like a stone. " And the emergency-room surgeon who yells at her, later, " I’m no fucking plumber! "

Despite the complications and the callous care, she lives to tell the tale, one that we may never again hear. In many ways, this brief, brilliant memoir recalls a time that no longer exists. With legality and accessibility, even the stigma surrounding abortion has faded to the point where many women feel comfortable discussing their procedures, much as we would our choices in birth-control or child-rearing techniques. This camaraderie, Ernaux reminds us, is recent. Before Roe v. Wade, and before the 1975 decision that brought the same freedom of choice to France, abortion was so secret, so shameful, that it served to separate women. In the landmark In Our Time, Susan Brownmiller discusses that wall of silence, recalling the first time she confessed her three illegal procedures. " You’re my best friend, but I never told you, " she tells a close friend. " I wasn’t sure what you’d think. "

An ocean away, Ernaux recalls a similar silence that’s described with moving simplicity. " I belonged to a different world, " she writes, upon discovering her pregnancy. " There were other girls, with their empty bellies, and there was me. " Even after the abortion, she recalls, " That night I knew I had lost the body I’d had since adolescence. . . .  " She was changed, perhaps as much by the societal trappings of her physical experience as by the surgical procedure that removed the growing fetus from her womb. Her ordeal has changed us as well.

Issue Date: December 20-27, 2001

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