Temporal Migrations in Annie Ernaux’s L’Événement: Recounting (a) Lived Experience(s) in Abortion Narrative

Abstract

In Annie Ernaux’s novel, L’Événement (2001), the author writes about her clandestine abortion while she was a college student. Ernaux constructs her narrative through her journal, which serves as proof while also allowing her to relive the experience from forty years before vividly. The narrative describes and recounts Ernaux’s experiences of seeking a person to provide the abortion, the process, and the moments afterward to her reader. Ernaux’s novel offers a temporal retelling through memory from her contemporary time to the past when she had an abortion. It blends the past and present lived experiences, reminding the reader of what was and juxtaposing it with what is. The text illustrates the conditions women experienced in telling their story while juxtaposing it with how women describe their abortion story currently during a time of legal certainty. Ernaux exposes the taboo of telling one’s abortion story. The narrative structure of Ernaux’s text also illustrates the lived experience for women of a particular class without access to abortion by challenging the taboo of discussing an abortion story publicly. This article analyses how Ernaux’s novel explicitly challenges the taboo in both past and present through a feminist narrative that describes a woman’s lived experiences.