Annie Ernaux: The Illegal Abortion That Nearly Took Her Life and Forged a Nobel Laureate's Legacy

Annie Ernaux: The Unflinching Truth of a Life Forged by Experience

“Every moment of that abortion was a surprise to me,” states Annie Ernaux, the acclaimed French Nobel literature laureate. These profound words anchor the story of a harrowing, illegal abortion in 1963 that irrevocably altered the trajectory of her life and career. At just 23, a budding writer and the first in her working-class family to attend university, Ernaux faced a devastating crossroads as her future ambitions threatened to crumble.

“Sex had caught up with me, and I saw the thing growing inside of me as the stigma of social failure,” she later reflected. Her diary, marked by terse, desperate entries like “RIEN. NOTHING.”, chronicled a terrifying countdown to what felt like an inevitable doom.

The Perilous Path: A Battle of Life and Death

In 1963 France, abortion was a clandestine, perilous affair. With information scarce and the threat of imprisonment looming for all involved, pregnant women had few options: a dangerous self-induced procedure or the hands of a backstreet abortionist, often dubbed “angel-makers.” The silence surrounding the issue was deafening. “It was secret, nobody talked about it,” Ernaux, now 85, recalls, highlighting how little young women knew about such procedures. Despite feeling utterly abandoned, Ernaux was fiercely determined. Her subsequent writings about this period underscore the immense strength required to confront such an ordeal. “Really it was a battle of life and death,” she asserts.

It was during this desperate time thata backstreet abortion nearly killed Annie Ernaux. It became a story that shaped her life, forming the foundational narrative of her seminal work,Happening. Turned away by legitimate doctors and unable to perform the procedure herself, she eventually located an illegal practitioner.

Ernaux's power lies in her unflinching eye for detail. “It’s the detail that matters,” she explains, recalling the knitting needle she retrieved from her parents’ home, and the shock of discovering a placenta to pass after miscarrying. The aftermath was brutal: rushed to the hospital from her university dormitory, hemorrhaging severely. “It was the worst violence that could be inflicted on a woman. How could we have let women go through this?” she questions. Her motivation to describe these raw events stemmed from a profound sense of historical duty. “I wasn’t ashamed to describe all that. I was motivated by the feeling that I was doing something historically important.”

Happening: A Legacy That Breaks the Silence

Published in 2000,Happeningshattered the silence around illegal abortion, revealing a hidden history that Ernaux feared would be forgotten. She observed that “the same silence that had reigned over illegal abortion was carried over to legal abortion.” Today, her book is a vital part of the French school curriculum and has inspired a multi-award-winning film, further amplifying its message.

Ernaux emphasizes the critical importance for young people to understand the dangers of illegal abortion, particularly as political discourse sometimes seeks to restrict access to legal reproductive healthcare, citing recent events in some US states and Poland. “It is a fundamental freedom to be in control of your body and therefore of reproduction,” she firmly states.

A Call for Remembrance: A Monument to the Unseen Victims

While abortions are now a constitutional right in France—a pioneering guarantee—Ernaux advocates for official recognition of the countless women who perished due to illegal procedures. With estimates suggesting between 300,000 and one million illegal abortions occurred annually in France before its legalization in 1975, the true toll remains unknown, often masked by disguised causes of death. “I think they deserve to have a monument, like there is to the unknown soldier in France,” she proposes. Earlier this year, Ernaux was part of a delegation presenting this idea to the Mayor of Paris, its fate resting on upcoming elections.

The subject retains its potent ability to shock. Audiences watching stage adaptations of her work, such asThe Years, which includes an abortion scene, are routinely overcome. Ernaux recounts peculiar reactions, like a male professor remarking, “it could have been me!”—a comment she interprets as revealing “this extraordinary fear of women’s power.”

The Unflinching Self: Examining a Life Without Fear

Ernaux's literary prowess lies in her fearless excavation of her own life. Her books bravely confront subjects often cloaked in shame and silence: sexual assault, intricate family secrets, and the anguish of losing her mother to Alzheimer’s. She concludesHappeningwith a declaration of purpose: “These things happened to me so that I may recount them.”

InA Girl’s Story, she details her first sexual encounter at a summer camp, an experience with an older leader that she now accepts would be considered rape. Yet, she deliberately omits the word “rape” from her text, choosing instead to “describe exactly what happened, without judgment.” This commitment to precise, unadorned truth is a hallmark of her style.

The Archive of Memory: When Diaries Vanish, Truth Endures

Ernaux meticulously kept personal diaries from age 16. After marriage, these cherished records were stored in a box in her mother’s loft. However, in 1970, her mother moved in with Ernaux’s family, bringing everything from the loft—except that crucial box. “I understood that she had read them and thought they should be destroyed,” Ernaux recounts, surmising her mother’s profound disgust. Though an immeasurable loss, Ernaux chose not to damage their relationship with a futile argument. And ultimately, her mother’s attempt to erase the past failed. “The truth survived the fire,” Ernaux famously writes inA Girl’s Story.

Without her diaries, Ernaux relied on the remarkable resilience of her memory. “I can take a walk through my past, as I wish. It’s like projecting a film,” she explains. This profound connection to memory also fueledThe Years, her seminal collective history of the post-war generation. “I simply had to ask myself, ‘What was it like, after the war?’ And I can visualize and hear it,” she says, drawing not only on her own recollections but the shared experiences of those around her.

The Voice of the "Internal Migrant"

Growing up amidst the constant hum of her parents’ café in Normandy, Ernaux absorbed adult problems from a tender age, a knowledge that initially brought her shame. “I wasn’t sure if my classmates knew as much about the world as I did,” she reflects. “I hated that I knew about men who were drunk, who drank too much. So I was ashamed of a lot of things.”

Her distinctive, pared-down, unadorned style emerged from writing about her father, a working man for whom plain language felt most authentic. At 22, she penned a guiding principle in her diary: “I will write to avenge my people.” This mission, to “redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth,” as she articulated in her 2022 Nobel lecture, defines her literary endeavor.

As someone who transitioned from a rural, working-class background to a middle-class suburban existence, Ernaux identifies as an “internal migrant.” For five decades, she has resided in Cergy, one of Paris’s “new towns,” witnessing its construction and growth since 1975. “We are all equal in this space—all migrants, from within France and from outside,” she observes. “I don’t think I would have the same perspective on French society if I lived in central Paris.” Her home, a testament to her success, was purchased with funds from her first literary prize.

Connecting Through Shared Vulnerability

The bond with her audience is crucial to Ernaux. When a passionate affair with a married Soviet diplomat concluded in 1989, writing about it provided solace and healing. After the publication ofA Simple Passion, an outpouring of connection followed. “Suddenly I started receiving many, many accounts from women, and men, who told me about their own love affairs. I felt like I had allowed people to open up about their secret,” she shares. Though acknowledging the shame often tied to such intense affairs, she confesses, “at the same time, I have to say that it is the most wonderful memory of my whole life.”

Annie Ernaux’s singular literary journey is a testament to the transformative power of personal truth. Through her unflinching gaze at memory, class, gender, and the human condition, she not only chronicled her own extraordinary life but also forged a profound connection with countless readers, illuminating the universal within the deeply personal.