[This is an excerpt from a longer workshop given for International Women Writer’s Guild this summer. Other readings for this workshop included "Etiology" by Linda Gregg; "Short Talk on Defloration" by Anne Carson; "The Little Girl Dreams of Dying" by Cameron Awkward Rich; Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–1920, collage, mixed media; "Cut with the Kitchen Knife" by Rosmarie Waldrop; Carlos Drummond de Andrade's "In the Middle of the Road" (trans. by Elizabeth Bishop); Robert Desnos, "Dove of the Ark" (translated by Timothy Adès); Linda Pastan's "The Almanac of Last Things". If you’d like a copy of the handout, email me and I’ll be happy to share it.]

It Keeps Happening: Annie Ernaux’s temporal strategies

Each word has a unique history. The noun, vegetable, originated in 1582 when an author named J. Hester spoke of "The hidden verdures of sondrie vegetables, animalles, and mineralles." The Oxford English Dictionary gives us thirty-six varying contexts for the word vegetable from 1582 to the present, and each context offers a different shade or hue of meaning.

My copy of the Scholastic Dictionary of Synonyms, Antonyms, and Homonyms lists the following for abortion:

Poems are made from words, and some words carry so much that it's difficult to read them, or to make sense of them. Abortion is one of those words — it means so many different things that aren't articulated or described in conversation. Abortion, in many ways, is meaningless when one says it because it's abstraction overwhelms its contextual reality. As a word, abortion is like God, nearly meaningless and certain to evoke strong emotions.

If anything is still interesting about abortion, it is this abstraction—this failure to mean what we expect when we use it.

One of my favorite French authors, Annie Ernaux, titled her book about abortion Happening.

In 1963, when she was 23, Annie Ernaux found herself host to an unplanned pregnancy. Enter shame, and the fear of being marked as a social failure. Ernaux takes us through her efforts to get a safe abortion. She wrote the book 40 years later, to break the silence of shame.

At a time when abortion was illegal in France, Ernaux attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died.

Happening is not the same thing as happened. The book moves across time so that the abortion is happening now, and Ernaux makes it keep happening, or maintains its ongoingness, by combining memories with diary entries from that time.

Although the book includes a memoir, it has been called an "eponymous novel." Ernaux's oeuvre expands fiction to include speculative nonfiction, or the errors of memory. One could debate genre in Ernaux for decades. But abortion is the subject today—and abortion is a topic that haunts the author —it is a stigma, a word related to the stigmata of nail wounds through the hands of a crucified Chist. Throughout the book she wonders about the presentation of the material, of how one deals in writing with such a happening, of how one recalls and reshapes it. Happening is itself like an abortion, she realizes, and when she releases it it will become public, completely beyond her control.

Am I the author of my abortion? I have asked this question of the writer who uses my name. It is a question I love for its frictions.

Two more thoughts:

"I shall have no more power over my text," Ernaux writes. Writing about it will also have its aftereffects—this reference to future time, and to being exposed or misinterpreted is common to Ernaux's writing, particularly since she reinterprets the self again and again over time, across novellas.
"This thing had no place in language," Ernaux says of abortion. It is also something she feels compelled to record, even so long (nearly four decades) after the fact, going so far as to state about writing this account: "(...) if I failed to go through with this undertaking I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy."

This thing with no place in language is a gauntlet the writer picks up—to carve space for the unspeakable, the marginalized.

To quote Ernaux's book:

I want to pause at this invisible ellipsis—or the breakoff point—the cliff labeled “This investigation” which waits for you to stand at its steep edge and look down. There is no “correct” moral response or sentiment: I laughed during my abortion. I laughed at the absurdity of suddenly finding myself fallen. A “fallen woman” may find the fall interesting.