Mladík / Událost – Ernauxová Annie (2023)

I believe that every experience, regardless of its nature, has an undeniable right to be recorded. ***** The book presents two texts by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux. The young man is a narrative by the fifty-year-old writer about a passionate love affair with a man thirty years her junior. The relationship evokes memories of her own youth and feelings as if she were outside of time, not aging or living her life backward. ***** The second text, The Event, takes the author back to 1963, to her diary entries; at the age of twenty-three — as a single woman — she discovers that she is pregnant. She is consumed by shame: she understands that pregnancy would socially destroy her and her family, and she also knows that she cannot keep the child. In France, where abortion is illegal, she desperately tries to terminate the pregnancy using a knitting needle. In fear and despair, she ultimately seeks out an abortionist and ends up in the emergency room of a hospital, where she nearly loses her life. In a text written forty years later, Ernaux touches on the trauma she has never overcome.