Anyone who spends two hours with Annie Ernaux on her balcony in her house in Cergy Pontoise, a suburb of Paris, drinks coffee with her, eats macarons and talks about everything, asks himself on the train back to the capital, where she is by the way to this day not feeling well, especially one thing: Why has nobody ever mentioned that this Annie Ernaux is funny? In the general perception, the eighty-one-year-old is considered to be a very serious, perhaps even boring person who has been writing autobiographical books in extremely clear and distant form about poverty, the conflict that triggers social advancement and the lives of women for decades wields the moral club and has no sense of humor. None of this is true. Annie Ernaux laughs, a lot, aloud too. For example when she tellsAs she once said on a television program in the eighties “Why should all this shit get stuck with women?” It was about raising children - and the French women who back then wanted to pretend they could do anything (children , Job, exciting love life) looked very piqued. Annie Ernaux is happy about that to this day, she likes to imitate the indignant faces. At that time it was about her second novel "La femme gelée", which had not yet been translated into German. With her fourth she won the prestigious "Prix Renaudot" in 1984, since then she has been considered one of the most important French writers of her generation, an archivist of the life of a social class that did not appear in French literature before her.The conversation on the balcony in Cergy Pontoise is now supposed to be about her autobiographical text “The Event”, the story of her illegal abortion in the early sixties.

Madame Ernaux, “The Event” is only now being published in German, twenty-one years after the French original.

How is it for you to talk about it again for so long afterwards?

Let's put it this way: I can reactivate the urgency with which I wrote it.

Besides, the topic is topical.

When I see what's going on in Texas, I think it's only a matter of time before we are challenged again with abortion law.

Do you really believe that?

Absolutely.

Abortion remains a sensitive issue simply because it is about life.

Irrational but very deeply anchored feelings play a role here.

How was your book received in France back then?

Ha!

Not at all!

At that time I had already published “Der Platz”, which won a big prize, had been invited to literary programs, many articles had appeared about me, mostly praising, and yet “The Event” was completely lost.

Virtually nothing came up, no reviews, no television.

Some were nice enough to tear it up, but the basic attitude was embarrassed silence.

Silence.

As if it were tasteless to write about it, as if it didn't belong, as if it was a little dirty.

Because abortion had meanwhile been legalized in France and people thought “what does she want”?

Maybe.

From a feminist point of view, the nineties were terrible years anyway.

People pretended that everything had been achieved and when someone asked for something, they said: “What else do women want?

You have everything! ”But I think above all that they did not want to discuss publicly what such an abortion does to the body.

When I had published Passion Simple a few years earlier, a book in which I write about an obsessive, passionate relationship with a man, no one thought it was too intimate.

Sex in its happy form, the excited body, that interests people - but when it comes to the broken, almost bleeding body of a young woman, everyone looks the other way.

Then it's a "woman's business".

Is it so different today?