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Meticulous catalog of longing, humiliation, class anxiety and emotional distress, Ernaux’s books are unsparing in detail, pitiless in tone. In contrast to those of so many other confession-minded peers, her shock tactics feel principled, driven less by narcissism or the need for self-justification than by some loftier impulse: a desire to capture the past as it was, undistorted by faulty memoirs, moral judgments or decorative literary flourishes. "I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it," she declares in "Shame," explaining her method. Instead, she writes, "I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself."

It is a quixotic undertaking, a fact of which Ernaux is acutely aware. Nowhere more so, perhaps, than in her latest book, "Happening," a harrowing account (superbly translated by Tanya Leslie) of the illegal abortion she underwent in 1963 as a 23-year-old college student in Rouen. As subject matter goes, little could be more inherently provocative. Ernaux’s take is all the more so for being unabashedly philosophical rather than moral. She regards abortion not as a courageous choice or grave mistake but as a literary opportunity: "The things happened to me so that I might recount them." But how to describe an experience so shrouded in shame and secrecy that is literally unspeakable? Alarmed to discover that she is pregnant (by a difficult political science student she met during a summer vacation) she tries to plot her next move: "Although abortion was mentioned in many novels, no details were given about what actually took place. There was a sort of void between the moment the girl learns she is pregnant and the moment it’s all over." A search at the library is equally fruitless, yielding only articles on the "clinical consequences of ‘criminal abortion.’" A student to whom she turns for advice tries to seduce her. A gynecologist dismisses her with a smile, saying, "Love children are the most beautiful of all." The silence surrounding her situation extends to her own diary, where Ernaux documents her physical transformation in terse, cryptic allusions: "There was no point in naming something that I was planning to get rid of. In my diary I would write, ‘it’ or ‘that thing,’ only once ‘pregnant.’" In desperation, she takes a pair of knitting needles and attempts to end the pregnancy herself. When the pain proves too much to bear, she winds up on the examination table of a local doctor who, after verifying that the fetus is intact, sends her home with a prescription for penicillin and a plea, "Don’t tell me where you’re going, I don’t want to know." Leaving his office, Ernaux reflects, "neither of us had mentioned the word abortion, not even once."

For Ernaux, speechlessness is a badge of authenticity. The most accurate account of her abortion, she repeatedly suggests, is one that’s impossible to tell. While this sounds like a perverse (and somehow peculiarly French) stance for a memoirist to take, Ernaux deploys it to canny effect. Her struggle as a writer to represent her past echoes her struggle as a young woman to resolve her predicament and adds to the raw power of her book.

The abortion she finally manages to obtain is horrifying: a crude procedure involving boiling water and a speculum administered by a sharp-tongued, off-duty nurse in a shabby Parisian garret. And this scene turns out to be merely a prelude to further gruesomeness back in Ernaux’s dormitory room, where she delivers a three-month-old fetus and ends up nearly dying from blood loss. At this point, Ernaux lays her scruples about writing aside, an acknowledgment, perhaps, that despite the obstacles she has succeeded in portraying what she rightly calls "an extreme human experience, bearing on life and death, time, law, ethics and taboo - an experience that sweeps through the body."