SOURCE: Miller, Nancy K. “Unsafe and Illegal.” Women's Review of Books 19, no. 6 (March 2002): 11.

In the following essay, Miller views Happening as both an account of Ernaux's illegal abortion and also a “meditation on the nature of memory.”

It's hard to forget your first abortion. The memory of that experience haunts coming-of-age accounts of life before the pill. The clandestine solution to unwanted (unthinkable would be closer to the emotional truth) pregnancy punctuates women's memoirs of this period—Audre Lorde's Zami or Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters—and looms large in women's fiction from Mary McCarthy's A Charmed Life, where the heroine dies in a car crash on her way to finding an abortionist, to Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. (Arguably the grimmest—and borderline implausible—representation of an abortion from this era appears in John Barth's The End of the Road, whose heroine ends up bleeding to death...