Happening

In 1963 France, 23-year-old Annie Duchesne, a promising university student from a working-class background, discovers she is pregnant. In a society where abortion is illegal and heavily stigmatized, this revelation threatens to derail her academic future and brand her and her family with unbearable shame. 'Happening' (L'Événement) is Annie Ernaux's unflinching and profoundly intimate memoir, written nearly forty years after the fact, recounting her harrowing and solitary struggle to terminate her pregnancy. Faced with institutional indifference and societal condemnation, she navigates a desperate and dangerous path, attempting self-induced abortion with a knitting needle and enduring back-alley procedures that bring her to the brink of death. Ernaux dissects the physical, emotional, and social terror of her experience, exposing the brutal realities faced by women denied bodily autonomy. It is a powerful testament to personal trauma and a stark indictment of the historical subjugation of women's rights, told with remarkable clarity and piercing honesty.