Maltese translation of Ernaux’s ‘L’Événement’ hits close to home

Struggles with Catholic moral values in dealing with life, death and sexuality

Charles Xuereb
June 8, 2025

Book review: L-Avveniment, by Annie Ernaux. Translated into Maltese by Claudine Borg

French author Annie Ernaux, Noble Prize winner for Literature in 2022, in her book L’Événement, originally published in 2000, honestly bares her heart with readers by choosing to describe a series of personal painful realisations: the undesired metamorphosis of her own body and what she is permitted to do with it.

In this short autobiographical narration at the threshold of her identity as an adult, Ernaux divulges her own tribulations when, as a university student back in 1963, she travailed in depressing solitude to find where she could illegally abort the unwanted ‘thing’ in her womb.

Continued: https://timesofmalta.com/article/maltese-translation-ernaux-l-evenement-hits-close-home.1110947

08.06.2025

UK – Trigger warnings may do more harm than good. Witness ‘the abortion play’

Hit drama The Years has seen audience members fainting hysterically. Perhaps if we dispensed with the red flags, people would enjoy this fine play

Kate Maltby
Sat 15 Feb 2025

If your Valentine disappointed you this weekend, spare a thought for the protagonist of The Years, the explosive West End play based on the writings of the French novelist and Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. A teenager is thrilled to discover she has attracted the temporary attention of an older man at summer camp. After he painfully takes her virginity, she gradually realises that he has told half the resort. She finds the word “whore” scribbled across her bathroom mirror. Still she yearns for the validation of his returning desire.

The play takes as its subject the full range of life experiences contingent on embodied womanhood. Like the Ernaux memoir from which it draws its name, its heroine tells her story in the plural “we” and speaks for a generation of war-born French women. To the frustration of its artists, however, one of those experiences has captured all the headlines.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/15/trigger-warnings-dont-help-ptsd-but-they-do-a-lot-to-raise-peoples-expectations

15.02.2025

France urged to exonerate women convicted under old abortion laws

As France commemorates 50 years since the law decriminalising abortion came into effect, prominent figures in politics and the arts are urging the government to exonerate women convicted for abortions before 1975.

Jan 17, 2025

We, activists, researchers, elected officials, demand the rehabilitation of women unjustly convicted of abortion,” they wrote in a petition published on the Libération website.

The law, first debated by MPs in 1974, was championed by health minister Simone Veil and adopted for a trial period of five years before being made permanent in 1979.

Continued: https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250117-france-urged-to-exonerate-women-convicted-under-old-abortion-laws

18.01.2025

News

Anne-Cécile Mailfert

Annie Ernaux

exonerate women convicted of abortion

This play’s abortion scene made grown men faint – and I’m thrilled it’s about to get a bigger audience

Annie Ernaux’s The Years is transferring to the West End. It’s about time the arts confront the way women’s bodies work

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
Fri 3 Jan 2025

Following a sold-out run at the Almeida theatre, this month The Years – a stage adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s choral novel of 21st-century womanhood – transfers to the West End. The play became somewhat notorious because of the impact that its abortion scene was having on audience members. In the scene, a bloodied Romola Garai recounts passing a dead foetus after an illegal backstreet abortion, a performance our theatre critic described as “devastating”. A preview last summer had to be stopped as several audience members requested medical assistance, while another shouted at the cast that the scene had been “a disgrace” and protested that “there was no warning” (content notes were, in fact, provided).

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/03/the-years-annie-ernaux-abortion-play-west-end

Michiana Chronicles: Ceci n’est plus un cintre – Abortion as a Constitutional Right in France

Anne Magnan-Park focuses on the right to “end pregnancy voluntarily” in France.

WVPE 88.1 Elkhart/South Bend | By Anne Magnan Park
Published January 11, 2024

In her memoir entitled Happening [2], Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux retraces her experience as a 23-year-old promising student. Her narrative focuses on the abortion she received in January 1964, eleven years before abortion became legal in France [3], and during which she almost lost her life. In her memoir, Ernaux draws meticulously from her journals to stay true to the details of her psychological and physical ordeals.

Continued: https://www.wvpe.org/commentary/2024-01-11/michiana-chronicles-ceci-nest-plus-un-cintre-abortion-as-a-constitutional-right-in-france

11.01.2024

Argentina – The Abortion Plot

A newly translated novel by the Argentinean writer Sara Gallardo provides a missing link in the history of abortion literature.

By S. C. Cornell
December 9, 2023

In the nineteenth century, when a character had premarital sex, you held your breath not for an abortion but for a wedding. Think of “Pride and Prejudice,” where Lydia’s child marriage comes as a great relief. The marriage plot relegates the actual having of children to the last page, just after the rice is thrown and the reader assured that our heroine will be happy and rich. If great Western literature of the time does allude to abortion, it does so subtly or with plausible deniability. The first time I read “War and Peace,” I managed to miss the suggestion that Hélène died of an overdose of abortifacient drugs. In “Middlemarch,” when Rosamond goes horseback riding against the explicit wishes of her doctor husband and subsequently miscarries, Eliot hastens to explain that this was a “misfortune” and that “there were plenty of reasons why she should be tempted to resume her riding.”

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-abortion-plot

09.12.2023

‘Silence guarantees nothing will change’: film-makers challenge the anti-abortion movement

Audrey Diwan’s 1960s-set drama Happening is the latest in a wave of films on an issue that is increasingly topical

Rachel Pronger
Fri 22 Apr 2022

When Audrey Diwan first started writing a script about abortion, people would ask her why. Adapting Annie Ernaux’s memoir about the author’s struggle to obtain an illegal abortion as a student in 1960s France, Diwan knew the story was important, but it was difficult to persuade others of its relevance. Fast forward a few years, and no one is asking why. When Happening premiered at the Venice film festival last year, critics were quick to draw connections between the plight of Anne (the character in the film) and the tightening of abortion restrictions around the world. As it lands in UK cinemas this week, this period piece feels timelier than ever.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/apr/22/silence-guarantees-nothing-will-change-film-makers-challenge-the-anti-abortion-movement

France – ‘Illegal abortions are not an old story for many women’

Audrey Diwan on her new film, Happening, based the 2000 memoir by celebrated French writer Annie Ernaux

April 18, 2022
Tara Brady

Following in the footsteps of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Audrey Diwan’s powerful period drama makes a devastating case for sexual and reproductive freedom.

Adapted from L’Événement, the 2000 memoir by celebrated French writer Annie Ernaux, Happening recounts the author’s desperate attempts to get an abortion when she was a promising young student in 1964, a decade before France legalised abortion in 1975.

Continued: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/illegal-abortions-are-not-an-old-story-for-many-women-1.4851768

18.04.2022

‘It plunged me back to waiting for a period’: Annie Ernaux and Audrey Diwan on abortion film Happening

An award-winning new drama tells the searing story of a young woman’s quest for an illegal abortion in 1960s France. Its director and the writer on whose autobiography it is based explain why the subject is still important

Lauren Elkin
Sun 3 Apr 2022

In a library, in France, in the 1960s, a young woman glances over her shoulder before opening a textbook to inspect a cross-section of a pregnant female body. A succession of nested U shapes show the way the uterus expands as the foetus grows. The foetus looks like a lima bean with legs. Someone comes; the young woman shields the book from view.

“Before you could ask questions on the internet, everything that happened inside the body was a mystery,” says Audrey Diwan, the director of the film Happening, in which this scene appears early on. “Something is taking place inside her body, her body is doing this work, but she doesn’t understand anything about it.”

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/apr/03/audrey-diwan-annie-ernaux-happening-interview

03.04.2022

An Abortion Film That’s Both Topical and Timeless

In the Sundance drama Happening, the hardest part of one woman’s unwanted pregnancy is managing everyone else’s expectations.

By Shirley Li
FEBRUARY 7, 2022

Anne Duchesne, the hero of the film Happening, is an intelligent and serious 23-year-old woman who knows what she wants. It’s 1963 in southwest France, and if her leering university classmates judge her, the daughter of a working-class family, for her literary ambitions and for hooking up with local men, so be it. Played by Anamaria Vartolomei, Anne is economical with her words and her friendships. She rarely switches up her wardrobe or hairstyle. And when she learns that she’s pregnant, she immediately asks her doctor to terminate it. “I’d like a child one day,” she says later, “but not instead of a life.”

Based on the acclaimed author Annie Ernaux’s semi-autobiographical novel, Happening follows Anne as she seeks an illegal abortion. The director, Audrey Diwan, doesn’t indulge in melodrama; she takes a measured and minimalist approach to the story, immersing the audience in Anne’s perspective.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/02/happening-film-abortion/621615/