SOURCE: Howard, Gregory. Review of Happening, by Annie Ernaux. Review of Contemporary Fiction 22, no. 2 (summer 2002): 246.

In the following review, Howard praises Ernaux's honesty and descriptive detail in Happening.

In Happening Ernaux returns to the experience of her illegal abortion that she plumbed in Cleaned Out. While that book used fiction to explain and expunge, this book self-consciously returns to convey and contemplate. I say self-consciously because Ernaux has written a detailed, explicit book not only about her pregnancy and abortion, but also about remembering and writing. The book was written over the course of nine months; by beginning many sections with “Yesterday” or “Last night” Ernaux makes explicit the construction of this narrative in time. As such emotions veer, statements are made and contradicted. “Reality” in one section connotes the everyday world from which Ernaux in her condition has been exiled, and is the stark physicality and emotional...