How Annie Ernaux Inspired Me to Tell My Own Abortion Story

I read Annie Ernaux’s Happening, her account of her clandestine abortion in France, when it was published in 2000. In 2000, I was 34 and a mother. I had given birth at the chic clinic in Paris where I had also been born; my son was already accepted to the private school where all my friends wanted to enroll their children, and where I myself had been educated; I lived surrounded by antiques carefully assembled from my husband’s family and my own, and tasteful modern design. Our walls were taupe. I would never buy bread from the local supermarket.

Still, as it has been with every book by Annie Ernaux, I read Happening stunned by the feeling that she wrote specially for me. She wrote about an upbringing in a social class that was opposite to mine. Her parents ran a village café in Normandy, and she was the first in her family to attend university. But when I read her sentences about the traces of urine on her mother’s apron and the odor of rancid butter on a skirt, I knew exactly what she was writing about, even though I would not dare apply this word consciously to my situation. Shame.

Beyond our social differences Ernaux and I belonged to two different worlds in another sense. She writes in Happening: “So it would appear life is confined to the period separating Ogino method from the age of cheap condom dispensers. It’s one way of measuring it, possibly the most reliable of all.” I agreed. On this timeline, I’m the lucky one. I was born in 1966, after the feminist and sexual revolution, convinced it was the best moment in history. I had an abortion, I was 17, my father drove me back and forth to this same chic clinic.

I thought I had the luxury of avoiding thinking about it.

In 1964, when Annie Ernaux had her abortion, it was a crime punishable by law. She describes herself looking through libraries for books in which the heroine wants to get an abortion. She was hoping to find companionship in literature; she found nothing. In novels, the heroine was pregnant, and then she wasn’t anymore; the passage between these two states was an ellipse.

The card catalog entry for “Abortion” at the library only listed scientific or legal journals addressing the subject as a matter of criminal justice. She felt even more resolutely cast back into her solitude, reduced to her social condition. Illegal abortion, with its physical and moral brutality, was at that time a matter of obscure local rumor.

In 2000, the publication of Happening didn’t make much of an impact. It was an upsetting story. A journalist dealt the following blow to her: “Your book made me nauseous.” She did not get the significant reviews or the TV invitations she usually received. Happening was a minor work. The consensus seemed to be that abortion was not a great subject of literature. She disagreed; it’s “an extreme human experience, bearing on life and death, time, law, ethics, and taboo.”

Reading Annie Ernaux, I felt her solitude and shame, but I had difficulty admitting they were also mine.

Then, in 2014, after I had already published a few books, I read an interview with Annie Ernaux in the communist daily L’Humanité. She recalled that “a solitude without limits surrounds women who get abortions.” How “women can take nothing for granted” yet they “do not mobilize enough.” I felt she was pointing at me, saying, Colombe, you had an abortion, you used the law, and you never said anything about it.

It was a Friday. I was divorced, and my two children were with their paternal grandparents for the weekend; I went to bed and took my computer on my knee without any idea where it would take me. I wrote about the abortion I had had when I was seventeen, how I did not talk about it because I was ashamed, and suddenly, because Annie Ernaux had pointed the finger at me, I wanted to put an end to the shame, to the solitude.

My father never tried to kill my mother, as Annie Ernaux’s father tried to do, but I hooked myself to her sentences in Shame, the book she wrote after his death. “My father tried to kill my mother just before I was twelve. This is the first time I am writing about what happened. Until now, I have found it impossible to do so, even in my diary. I considered writing about it a forbidden act that would call for punishment. (I felt relief just now when I saw that one could go on writing and that nothing terrible had happened.)”.

Before reading Shame, I was the ventriloquist of my parents. How happy my father was during the summer of 1943 in Haute Garonne, learning to catch trout with his hands. How sad my mother was in the winter of 1942 because of the big slice of black bread with a little piece of butter in the middle that she had to eat in the convent where she was in hiding. These were fictions suitable for us children. Surviving the Holocaust was certainly not part of these acceptable tales. Growing up, I was trapped in comfort, my childhood bedroom with Laura Ashley curtains. I did not want to make a stain on the cream wool carpet with dirt. I preferred to stick to their clean versions.

It took me four days to write my abortion, circling around and around, catching every drop of my blood. I was surprised by my mother’s absence; she was behind a wall, her arms tied behind her back. She never left the convent where she survived the war, never left the guilt of having survived her family. My father was always on the run, escaping something—what, I had no clue.

As a child, I read the telephone directory compulsively, first and last names, addresses, and phone numbers of people I did not know; I was searching for the identities of the missing. Neither my mother nor my father could mention their names and existence, thinking you can erase the past with silence. I took the opposite way, searching and writing obsessively about the absents. Annie Ernaux used words like sperm, blood, and urine; she showed me how to find my shameless vocabulary, I could use them too and add Auschwitz, the Nazis, Vichy.

When at 17, I found out I was pregnant. I was furious: my body had let me down. I thought they were there was no difference between boys and girls, and pow! I had a girl’s body, a uterus. I was pregnant and angry. Society had lied to me. I had believed what I had been taught in school, that the pronoun il was neutral, that I too belonged to il when the masculine took precedence over the feminine, that we were all included in the indeterminate group of il. It wasn’t true. It was a lie; I was a girl, I was Elle, and I was less than il, and I had to efface myself.

That boy in his male body could have as much sex as he liked, with no risk of getting pregnant, none whatsoever. Whereas I—I had to be careful. My father said to me (although he had always given me the opposite impression, admiring my ambition, my bad temper, my willfulness): “you’re a girl, you must be careful with your body, it’s fragile.” I was a girl, then, and, at seventeen years old, I had just found out. I was ashamed of it; I hunched over, hid my too-large breasts, my too-generous curves. I was ashamed and I was fragile.

Annie Ernaux writes generously and precisely to other writers. I used to read the letters she sent me too quickly; I was embarrassed. (Not anymore. When someone says something about my books, I now concentrate on hearing and remembering each word.) Without her, I would not have known that I could write as revenge against shame and solitude, that they are the only subjects of literature that truly matter.

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Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories by Colombe Schneck, translated by Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer, is available from Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.