Review: Happening

Happening by Annie Ernaux
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Doctors back then were brutal towards women who tried to get abortions or unwed mothers giving birth, being rough and hurling insults at them. The author’s writing style lets us into her current thoughts about her past. The reader then knows how Ernaux feels about the circumstances that were had. I’d like to read more personal accounts of what happens to women who go through with abortion or even contraceptions throughout history. This book made me reflect on my own experiences and how closely we think alike. How we feel alienated from normalcy, an outcast hiding a secret. In today’s world, I feel that medical professionals still slyly judge your answers to their questions. It’s felt throughout the book as well. This was incredibly hard to get through due to the brutal ways she was treated, and how she hid the pregnancy. The book was only 100 pages long but was so deep that it felt like I read a lifetime. Wonderful and powerful.

Quotes:
* i held out my hand but she didn’t give it to me. she laid it down on the desk
* the cinema was almost empty. (…) The theater was packed.
* Pregnancy certificate of: Mademoiselle Annie Duchesne. Date of delivery: July 8, 1964. i saw summer, sunshine. I tore up the certificate.
* the following persons shall be liable to both a fine and a term of imprisonment: (…) abortive practices
* you couldn’t tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned.
* why i was so distressed: compared to such people embodying normality, I had become an emotional outcast.
* as soon as i feel like looking up their names in the electronic phone book, i realize this would be a mistake.
* this emphasis on practicality was strangely comforting. No feelings, no morals.
* at that point i killed my own mother inside of me.
* there was a blinding pain. she kept saying, “stop screaming, girl” and “let me get on with my job” or maybe other words but they all meant the same thing: we had to go through with it. (…) she was too satisfied it was all over. i don’t recall handing her the money.
* i’m going back to see the abortionist as she hasn’t succeeded.
* today smugglers are vilified and pursued like abortionists were thirty years ago. no one questions the laws and world order that condone their existence. yet surely, among those who trade in refugees, as among those who once traded in foetuses, there must be some sense of honor.
* she sat down beside me and suggested that I start breathing like a puppy, the way pregnant women are instructed to do.
* O went to bed, telling me to call her if I needed her. Neither of us knew what the future would hold.
* it’s an indescribable scene, life and death in the same breath. A sacrificial scene.
* Nothing about her bourgeois ideas or her beliefs had prepared O to sever the umbilical cord of a three-month-old fetus.
* He asked me to pay for the consultation. I was incapable of standing up, so he opened the drawer of my desk and helped himself from my wallet.
* I shall have no more power over my text exposed to the public just like my body was exposed at the hospital
* She had kept the child yet people were no kinder to her. Girls who abort and unwed mothers from working-class Rouen were handed the same treatment. In fact, they probably despise her even more.
* I am treated the young surgeon to tell me what he was going to do. (…) shouting, “I’m no fucking plumber!”The last words I heard before coming to the anesthetic. (…) in my mind. This sentence continues to split the world in two.
* My belly was a flaccid basin
* I felt that I had been served my own placenta
* If I had been told the name of the intern who was on duty that night, and if I still remembered it, nothing would stop me from divulging it here. that would be a petty act of revenge indeed, and totally unfair since his attitude merely reflected a common practice in those days.
* I had given birth to both life and death.
* grey winter days (…) bathed in light
* My body harboring the secret of that night of January 20 through the 21st as something sacred. (…) of horror and beauty. I felt proud.
* Who have ventured where others fear to tread


View all my reviews