A review by geraldinerowe
Happening by Annie Ernaux

challenging emotional informative inspiring sad fast-paced

4.5

Part memoir, part social commentary, covering both the misogyny and classism of 1960s France, this is an incredibly powerful book about the author's experience of abortion in her early twenties. Ernaux repeatedly plunges you into her novelistic style of storytelling, only to pull you out again to remind you that she's writing this from memory four decades later. Seeing her experiences from both the perspective of her young self as it happened, and also with hindsight telling us what stayed with her and affected her later life, makes the book all the more compelling.
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