Books like Happening
In 1963, Ernaux, a twenty-three-year-old student in Rouen, finds she is pregnant at a time when abortion is illegal in France.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Happening
A Girl's Story
Ernaux goes back to the summer of 1958, when at eighteen she worked as a counsellor at a holiday camp and had her first sexual experience, and to the shame that followed.
Shame
Ernaux begins from a Sunday in June 1952 when her father tried to kill her mother, and reconstructs the world of the twelve-year-old girl she was.
Before Night Falls
Reinaldo Arenas's memoir, written as he was dying in New York, of growing up poor in rural Cuba, his years as a gay writer persecuted by Castro's regime, and his escape.
Boyhood
Coetzee's account, written in the third person, of a boy growing up in Worcester, a provincial town in the Cape, in the late 1940s and early 50s.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Seven weeks after his mother killed herself, Handke wrote this compact account of her life to keep her from vanishing into the ordinary.
The Copenhagen Trilogy
Tove Ditlevsen's memoirs of growing up poor in Copenhagen's working-class Vesterbro in the 1920s, wanting to be a poet, and the marriages and dependencies that followed.
The Words
Sartre's account of his childhood to the age of eleven in his grandfather's Paris apartment, among books, and how he decided to become a writer.
The Age of Reason
Over two days in Paris in the summer of 1938, Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher who prizes his freedom above everything, tries to raise the money for his mistress's abortion.
Dora Bruder
Modiano comes across a notice in a December 1941 newspaper asking for news of a missing fifteen-year-old Jewish girl in Paris, and spends years trying to trace her.
The Year of Magical Thinking
After her husband's sudden death and her daughter's hospitalisation, Didion keeps a forensic record of what magical thinking her grief conjures and what it refuses to.
An Angel at My Table
Janet Frame's autobiography, from a poor childhood in Oamaru through eight years in mental hospitals to her escape into writing and to Europe.
Blue Nights
In the aftermath of her daughter Quintana's death, Didion turns the pale light of late summer on her own motherhood, her own failing body, and what it means to be the last one left.