"Every moment of that abortion was a surprise to me," says Annie Ernaux.
The French Nobel literature laureate is talking about an illegal abortion that nearly ended her life in 1963.
She was a 23-year-old student with ambitions to become a writer. But as the first in a family of labourers and shopkeepers to go to university, she could feel her future slipping away.
"Sex had caught up with me, and I saw the thing growing inside of me as the stigma of social failure," she wrote later.
Her one-word diary entries, as she waited for her period, read like a countdown to doom: RIEN. NOTHING.
