A backstreet abortion nearly killed her. It became a story that shaped the rest of her life

Vibeke Venemaand
Laura Gozzi,BBC World Service

"Every moment of that abortion was a surprise to me," says Annie Ernaux.

The French Nobel literature laureate is talking about an illegal abortion that nearly ended her life in 1963.

She was a 23-year-old student with ambitions to become a writer. But as the first in a family of labourers and shopkeepers to go to university, she could feel her future slipping away.

"Sex had caught up with me, and I saw the thing growing inside of me as the stigma of social failure," she wrote later.

Her one-word diary entries, as she waited for her period, read like a countdown to doom: RIEN. NOTHING.

Her options were to induce an abortion herself or find a doctor or backstreet abortionist who would do it at a price. The latter, usually women, were known as "angel-makers".

But it was impossible to get any information. Abortion was illegal and anyone involved - including the pregnant woman herself - could go to prison.

"It was secret, nobody talked about it," the 85-year-old says. "The girls of the time absolutely did not know how an abortion happened."

Ending the silence

Ernaux felt abandoned - but she was also determined. When writing about this time, she wanted to show how much strength it took to face this problem.

"Really it was a battle of life and death," she says.

In plain, factual language, Ernaux describes the events in unflinching detail in her book, Happening.

Turned away by doctors, and unable to do it herself, she eventually found a backstreet abortionist.

"It's the detail that matters," she says.

"It was the knitting needle I brought back from my parents' house. It was also that when I finally miscarried, I didn't know that there would be a placenta to pass."

After the backstreet abortion, she was rushed to hospital, haemorrhaging, from her university dormitory.

"It was the worst violence that could be inflicted on a woman. How could we have let women go through this?" she says. "I wasn't ashamed to describe all that. I was motivated by the feeling that I was doing something historically important.

"I realised that the same silence that had reigned over illegal abortion was carried over to legal abortion. So I said to myself, 'All this is going to be forgotten.'"

Happening, published in 2000, is now on the school syllabus in France and has been made into a multi-award-winning film.

Ernaux says it is important for young people to know the dangers of illegal abortion, because politicians sometimes seek to restrict access to legal abortion. She points to 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 says.

Abortions are now a constitutional right in France - the first country to guarantee this - but Ernaux wants recognition for the countless women who died following illegal abortions.

Nobody knows exactly how many, because the cause of death was often disguised. It has been estimated that between 300,000 and one million women had illegal abortions every year in France before it was legalised in 1975.

"I think they deserve to have a monument, like there is to the unknown soldier in France," she says.

Ernaux was part of a delegation to propose such a monument to the Mayor of Paris earlier this year, but whether any action is taken will depend on the outcome of elections in March.

The subject still has the power to shock. Audience members are routinely carried out of the theatre when watching a stage adaptation of Ernaux's book, The Years, which also features an abortion scene.

Ernaux says she has had some funny reactions. One male university professor told her: "it could have been me!"

"That shows up this extraordinary fear of women's power," she says.

In her work, Ernaux fearlessly examines her own life.

Her books touch on shameful subjects that many have experienced, but few dare speak about - sexual assault, dark family secrets, losing her mother to Alzheimer's.

"These things happened to me so that I may recount them," is how she ends Happening.

In A Girl's Story, she recounts her first sexual experience, working at a summer camp, when an older camp leader assaulted her.

At the time, she did not understand what was happening, and was "a bit like a mouse in front of a snake, who doesn't know what to do".

Now, she accepts it would be considered rape, but she says her book does not include this word. "Because what's important to me is to describe exactly what happened, without judgement."

These events were recorded in her personal diaries, which Ernaux kept from the age of 16. After she married, these precious items were kept in a box in her mother's loft, together with letters from her friends.

But in 1970, when Ernaux's mother came to live with her and her family, she brought everything from the loft - except that box and its contents.

"I understood that she had read them and thought they should be destroyed," says Ernaux. "She must have been completely disgusted."

It was an incalculable loss, but Ernaux did not want to ruin their relationship with a pointless argument. And as an attempt by her mother to erase the past, it failed.

"The truth survived the fire," Ernaux writes in A Girl's Story.

Without her diaries to refer to she relied on her memory, which proved to be sufficient, she says.

"I can take a walk through my past, as I wish. It's like projecting a film."

This is also how she wrote her seminal book The Years, a collective history of the post-war generation.

"I simply had to ask myself, 'What was it like, after the war?' And I can visualise and hear it," she says.

These memories are not just her own, but those shared by the people around her. Ernaux grew up in her parents' cafe in Normandy, surrounded by customers from morning until night.

It meant she learned about adult problems from a young age - which embarrassed her.

"I wasn't sure if my classmates knew as much about the world as I did," she says. "I hated that I knew about men who were drunk, who drank too much. So I was ashamed of a lot of things."

'I will write to avenge my people'

Ernaux writes in a pared-down, unadorned style. She developed it, she once said, when she started writing about her father, a working man for whom plain language seemed appropriate.

At the age of 22, she wrote in her diary: "I will write to avenge my people," a sentence that has been her guiding light. Her aim was to "redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth", she said in her Nobel lecture in 2022.

As someone who moved from a rural, working-class life to a middle-class life in the suburbs, she calls herself an internal migrant.

For the past 50 years she has lived in Cergy, one of five "new towns" built around Paris, where she moved with her then husband and children. In 1975 it was still under construction, and she has watched the town grow around her.

"We are all equal in this space - all migrants, from within France and from outside." she says. "I don't think I would have the same perspective on French society if I lived in central Paris."

She bought the house she lives in now with money from her first literary prize.

The connection with her audience is important for Ernaux.

When a passionate love affair with a married Soviet diplomat ended in 1989, it was writing about it that helped her recover.

After the publication of that book, A Simple Passion, consolation came her way from readers.

"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 says.

There is a certain amount of shame involved in having an all-consuming affair, she adds, "but at the same time, I have to say that it is the most wonderful memory of my whole life".

This content was created as a co-production between Nobel Prize Outreach and the BBC