She offers us her own life, her own pain, without shame – and gives voice to the silences of women. For this the Nobel prizewinner deserves to be celebrated
‘These things happened to me so that I might recount them,” Annie Ernaux writes in Happening, her slim retelling of the clandestine abortion she had in the 1960s, when the procedure was still illegal in France. “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing. In other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”
I felt a thrill when I first read these words. A greater rationale for autobiographical writing has perhaps never been asserted, at least not so poetically and politically. For a woman to write her life without shame or fear remains a radical and often transgressive act. As women, so much of our experience resides in the body; Ernaux’s lifelong project of rendering her own in writing – from the rape her younger self cannot name as such to her abortion, her experience of desire – has profoundly feminist implications, as much now as ever.