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 "Happening" is a memoir by Annie Ernaux; I chose it at a time when I couldn't read anything lengthy. It was listed among great novellas, though I don't think it is fiction. It's intimidating to read something by a Nobel winner--why not start with a novella?


Ernaux begins with an HIV test. She sits in a waiting room and listens as a biologist speaks into a phone. "No, your cell count is normal, perfectly normal." She immediately understands what is being not said but instead implied: "You have AIDS, and I can't comfort you. But perfectly is a word with three syllables. It takes a long time to say. So I might just say it several times."

Immediately, Ernaux is sending a subtextual message: I'm a writer, and I notice things. She proceeds to make a character out of herself. In her fury and terror, she imagines that a particular man she just saw ("half-heartedly") is a villain from a comic book; he roams the streets of Europe; he has one single goal of spreading HIV. At the same time, Ernaux cannot draw a line that connects the sex with the hospital visit. The idea that the two events could be causally linked seems absurd.

This is a frightening story, but it's also the story of a person discovering her vocation. At the end of the memoir, Ernaux writes (famously), "Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations, and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people." The thought is blunt, unsentimental, crystal clear--that's how the entire book is.

Great writing.


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