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A review by kavreb
Happening by Annie Ernaux
5.0
Who’s afraid of Annie Ernaux?
Not the first person to wonder that, and certainly you could brainstorm a list. For one, anybody creeped out by vivid descriptions of trying to DIY an abortion with a sewing needle.
But you'd be missing out. Not the gory parts, but this is vital stuff (even the gory parts). Like Ernaux herself writes, while abortion may be legal at the time of writing, it doesn't brush away the real experiences of women from when it wasn't legal - and like America has shown us (yet again in another dark example) a freedom fought for and gained can easily be taken away again.
This is the experience of one such young woman, as terrifying as it is informative, and with the awareness gifted by writing about it 35 years later, a quietly intelligent portrait of a person and of her time. While much more subjective than Ernaux’s masterpiece The Years, here Ernaux takes her body and, as she says (in a way), gives it to us, so that we could see and know of a time that once was, and in many places still is.
There’s a role for men to play as well here, as there obviously is, even though you wouldn't be at fault for missing it considering how aloof so many of us approach it, both before and after conception. Too often in Happening though that is the whole role - apologetic detachment, or insensitive curiosity. I'm just a story to them, it dawns on Ernaux, and what my situation can do for them. She's not a person, not really - but in patriarchy which woman is?
It is a story of hope and feminist rage, a friend told me. The feminist rage is obvious from every arrow slung at the system that sends desperate women to under-furnished two-room apartments in poor neighbourhoods of a person a friend’s friend knows, looking for liberation, setting themselves down the possible path of untimely death (every challenge made ten times worse if they also had participated in the sin of being born to the working class). The hope may be more difficult to come by.
But you can still see it - in the aid given by a person you never expected to but who through teared-up face held you aloft through an indescribable night whatever their personal beliefs, or in the reluctant help of the people whose conscience won't allow them to just say no, or the person who gave because they wanted to, or, first and most of all, the survival and the strength of the will with which one tackles a dehumanising sexist system and comes out the other side a bigger person.
Annie Ernaux bled and suffered, and with beautifully succinct and empathic prose she shared it all for those back there and us in the here and now and the future to be.
The story never ends, and the fight is always just around the corner. Read on, ye mighty, and let's fucking making it better.
Not the first person to wonder that, and certainly you could brainstorm a list. For one, anybody creeped out by vivid descriptions of trying to DIY an abortion with a sewing needle.
But you'd be missing out. Not the gory parts, but this is vital stuff (even the gory parts). Like Ernaux herself writes, while abortion may be legal at the time of writing, it doesn't brush away the real experiences of women from when it wasn't legal - and like America has shown us (yet again in another dark example) a freedom fought for and gained can easily be taken away again.
This is the experience of one such young woman, as terrifying as it is informative, and with the awareness gifted by writing about it 35 years later, a quietly intelligent portrait of a person and of her time. While much more subjective than Ernaux’s masterpiece The Years, here Ernaux takes her body and, as she says (in a way), gives it to us, so that we could see and know of a time that once was, and in many places still is.
There’s a role for men to play as well here, as there obviously is, even though you wouldn't be at fault for missing it considering how aloof so many of us approach it, both before and after conception. Too often in Happening though that is the whole role - apologetic detachment, or insensitive curiosity. I'm just a story to them, it dawns on Ernaux, and what my situation can do for them. She's not a person, not really - but in patriarchy which woman is?
It is a story of hope and feminist rage, a friend told me. The feminist rage is obvious from every arrow slung at the system that sends desperate women to under-furnished two-room apartments in poor neighbourhoods of a person a friend’s friend knows, looking for liberation, setting themselves down the possible path of untimely death (every challenge made ten times worse if they also had participated in the sin of being born to the working class). The hope may be more difficult to come by.
But you can still see it - in the aid given by a person you never expected to but who through teared-up face held you aloft through an indescribable night whatever their personal beliefs, or in the reluctant help of the people whose conscience won't allow them to just say no, or the person who gave because they wanted to, or, first and most of all, the survival and the strength of the will with which one tackles a dehumanising sexist system and comes out the other side a bigger person.
Annie Ernaux bled and suffered, and with beautifully succinct and empathic prose she shared it all for those back there and us in the here and now and the future to be.
The story never ends, and the fight is always just around the corner. Read on, ye mighty, and let's fucking making it better.