"Happening" by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie) is an astounding piece of autobiography which recounts the author's (a then 23-year-old college girl) struggle with an unwanted pregnancy in the winter of 1963, Rouen and her subsequent life-altering & traumatic experience of aborting the embryo. Annie Ernaux's writing flows in natural rhythms as she seamlessly intermingles memories of the past with present reflections of the past. It was incredibly hard to listen to at times and it gets shockingly graphic with her economically sprinkled descriptions. Annie Ernaux is a masterful writer who weaves the subtleties of every human emotion and anguish into her writing. What starts as a young, carefree girl's naivete about herself and the world turns her into a person wholly different than who she was before, transformed as she was by this mind-numbing experience. Ernaux states explicitly the reasons for writing this incredibly naked and personal book: to give manifestation to something universal, a feeling and pain that has been felt by thousands of women before her and must endure after her.