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... les choses me sont arrivées pour que j'en rende compte. Et le véritable but de ma vie est peut-être seulement celui-ci: que mons corps, mes sensations, et mes pensées deviennent de l'écriture.

... these things happened to me so that I might account for/realise them. And the true purpose of my life is perhaps only this: that my body, my feelings and my thoughts become writing.

Make no mistake, this is an unflinching account by Ernaux of a pivotal and horrific experience: as a twenty-three year old student in 1963 she found herself pregnant from a fleeting relationship, in a France where abortion was illegal and a criminal act. Anyone squeamish needs to be warned that Ernaux, with her usual unwavering and fearless gaze, doesn't shy away from the physical details of knitting needles, probes, induced miscarriage and the bloody results.

But none of this is either prurient or sensationalist. As the quotation above indicates, Ernaux has appointed herself the witness and creator of testimony for generations of women whose experiences have been secret, made to feel shameful, hidden and not acknowledged, perhaps sometimes, for various reasons, even by themselves.

One of the key points made here is how isolated Ernaux was during this desperate experience, forced into hiding it from her parents, with medical practitioners wary of the illegal status of her actions, and even being shouted at by a surgeon when rushed into hospital haemorrhaging.

So while this is a personal and subjective testimony, it also looks forward to Ernaux's The Years, a kind of group or generational biography that switches between the individual and the social. In some ways, Ernaux is speaking for women as a multiple, and is self-conscious of the circulation of gendered power in this story as overwhelmingly male lawmakers and physicians are gatekeepers to the experiences undergone by female bodies.

As always, Ernaux's writing is lucid and precise, and marked by its almost pellucid quality (so much so that I've switched to reading her in French). I can't put my finger on the particular alchemy of Ernaux's vision and prose but despite a significant age gap between us (she was born in 1940), she manages to hold up a mirror to women's lives and we see ourselves there.