Relatability Through Trauma
Annie Ernaux 'Happening'
When I read Annie Ernaux, I’m taken back to high school and college, and to the struggle I share with Annie Ernaux: a girl, raised working class, struggling to get out, with education as only real chance out. That Ernaux can show me the similarity between an immigrant kid in the bay area and a post war girl in the rural France shows something of her gift for relatability in its best form, not merely in the surface level mundane relatability of social media and the writers promoted there, but a deeper relatability that goes more toward to the core of who we are and what motives us as people. Ernuax writes with emotion, she pauses in the middle of her story to tell you what she’s thinking and feeling, so that she appears impartial and clinically precise. Her relatability comes from blunt honesty, and her unique gift of empathy, of showing the reader how, even if they’ve never had her experience, her experience isn’t dissimilar from experiences they’ve had.
I knew I’d read Ernaux’s Happening (2000) after I’d read The Years. Mostly because I’d read a great review of Happening first, and would have read it first had City Lights had a copy in stock. The basic premise is Ernaux was twenty-three when most of the events of the book took place, she’s at college which means she’s galloping along on that road into middle class respectability, and she realizes her menstrual period is late. She writes NOTHING into her diary, over and over, waiting for it to come. She gets a pregnancy test that confirms the dreadful truth. At first, she does nothing, in the way that one does when they cannot face a reality they’d rather avoid. It’s 1963, abortion is illegal in France, but Ernaux knows she will find a way to abort the pregnancy regardless. She captures so much of the horror of having something alien growing inside your body when you do not want it there. So horrifying that an illegal abortion, with the risk of serious injury or death, is a risk worth taking. She writes about how the doctors she saw failed her. “All in all, plunging a knitting needle into a womb weighed little next to ruining one’s career” (p 34- 35). A lot to do with how the experience linked her other women, how women helped her both literally and emotionally, how male doctors, male students were excited by what she wanted to do, but remained unhelpful. Why would they be, as hers was an experience that was alien to them as “it” (p24) was to her.
It’s a memoir about trauma, and in writing it forty years after the events instead of writing as if in the present, Ernaux shows how trauma echoes through one’s life. As I read it, I thought of how my own college-age trauma, the one I also had to put aside because I was on a similar path to Ernaux’s, the one that also changed me from child to adult. The way I felt when, on a weekend home from college, my mother telling me that she somehow knew that I was adult now, without knowing what forced the change. She captures how one doctor in particular, screaming “I’m no fucking plumber”, careless words in the face of trauma that echo through the traumatized person’s life while costing the person who said them nothing, perhaps the speaker doesn’t even know that their words devastated someone. I thought of words that affected me that way, and of the many, many survivors of assault I’ve spoken to since, similarly affected by carelessly evil words, similar in the experiences were so rooted in being a woman. In Ernaux’s case, that doctor (intern, actually) spoke carelessly because he thought Ernaux was a working class shop girl type, he hadn’t realized that she’s a college student, and regrets his carelessness only in regards to her new class. Despite all that’s happened, she’s made it. She’s “floated in the midst of the world, bathed in light.” (p 84).
