There is a moment early on in Audrey Diwan’s film adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir Happening, published in French in 2000 as L’Événement, where the twenty-three-year-old protagonist Anne’s friend Brigitte takes a pillow from her dorm room bed, folds it neatly in two, and places herself on top of it, as one might a rocking horse. Astride the pillow, she demonstrates to her two friends how one might pleasure oneself with a man. There is something uncanny about the scene’s literalness — its perfunctory exploration of desire — as if her body were a car in a show room or a piece of furniture in a store and she were performing a demonstration of the object’s function.

Nothing is said during the scene while Brigitte proceeds with her monologue. Anne looks on with what appears to be an amalgamation of horror and discomfort; this is clearly not how she imagines desire. Autoeroticism, we are to understand, is no substitute for risking pleasure with a man, though in 1963, there are few alternatives for young women, for whom sex — without the resources of contraception and abortion — carries unfathomable consequences.

In Happening, Ernaux sets out to write the event of abortion as it occurs to her in January 1963, twelve years before it was legalized in France and twenty years after the death of Marie-Louis Giraud. Giraud was the last woman to be guillotined in France for practicing abortion, the consequence of a recent law of the Vichy regime, made vulnerable by occupation. The memoir narrates the events between the author’s knowledge of her pregnancy and its termination. The intensity of the timeline reflects the deranged, dreamlike experience that Ernaux describes as having “time growing inside you.” In the memoir, she is working on a paper on female French surrealists; her life thrusts her into its tradition.