“that thing”
Happening“that thing” is the narrator’s deliberately evasive name for her pregnancy in her diary. The phrase does more than avoid a direct label: it refuses the future implied by ordinary words for pregnancy and records a condition she intends to end. As the narrator’s body changes, the language shifts between distance and recognition, making the phrase a measure of how difficult it is to imagine what is happening to her.
Naming and Refusal
The narrator explains that she does not use descriptions such as being pregnant or expecting, because those expressions imply a future event that will not happen. In her diary, she writes “it” or “that thing”; she records the word pregnant only once. The distinction is purposeful. Naming the condition in conventional terms would, in her account, seem to affirm a future she rejects. The impersonal phrase instead keeps the pregnancy at a remove, without allowing it to become an anticipated child in her imagination.
That refusal unfolds alongside the narrator’s ordinary university routine. She attends literature and sociology classes, eats in the canteen, and drinks coffee at La Faluche, but experiences herself as living in a separate world from other students. Her language makes that separation visible: what is growing inside her is not readily incorporated into the vocabulary of classes, cafés, or plans for the future. “That thing” marks a private reality that continues beneath familiar daily activities without being given the name that might make it seem settled or welcome.
Social Meaning and Self-Perception
The phrase also belongs to a conflict in the narrator’s understanding of herself. She alternates between disbelief that this has happened to her and a conviction that it was bound to happen. She connects that sense of inevitability to earlier feelings of sexual shame and to the effort and humiliation involved in avoiding intercourse. The diary’s indirect language does not resolve this contradiction; it preserves the tension between an event experienced as unlikely and one she retrospectively imagines as almost fated.
The narrator further links her condition to her working-class origins. She is the first in her family of laborers and shopkeepers to pursue higher education, and her studies have helped her avoid factory or commercial work. Yet she feels that education has not removed the poverty associated with her background. She interprets the pregnancy as a stigma of social failure, placing it beside alcoholism as another embodiment of working-class hardship. In this context, “that thing” is not simply a private euphemism. It withholds a name from a condition the narrator experiences as carrying a social judgment she cannot escape through educational achievement.
The Body and the Diary
The narrator’s physical awareness and her capacity to imagine the pregnancy do not develop at the same pace. By mid-December, her clothes feel tight and her body heavy, although her nausea has stopped. At times she forgets that she is two months pregnant. The ordinary winter scene of lying on her bed in sunlight and listening to the Brandenburg Concerti resembles the previous year, and she feels as if nothing has changed. Bodily evidence and daily sameness coexist, sustaining the distance expressed by the phrase.
A diary entry makes that distance especially clear: the narrator can touch her belly and know the pregnancy is there, yet cannot imagine it beyond that knowledge. She projects forward to July, when a child would be born if time took its course, but says she cannot feel that future as real. The diary therefore holds together two forms of awareness: direct recognition of the present condition and an inability to picture its possible outcome. “That thing” belongs to this interval between knowing and imagining, where the pregnancy is materially present but remains abstract to her.
From Evasion to Action
The narrator’s language also sits beside her growing determination to end the pregnancy. She has heard accounts of abortion through novels and local gossip and regards it as a feasible, if difficult, undertaking. After finding no solution, she retrieves a pair of blue knitting needles she had bought for a cardigan and decides to take matters into her own hands. Her attempt does not succeed; she recognizes that she cannot manage alone. The object and the failed action make the stakes of the diary’s distance concrete without changing what the phrase does: it names a condition she intends to remove, not a future she accepts.
Later, LB gives her the address of Madame P-R, a middle-aged paramedic who performs abortions, and describes the procedure and its risks. This information offers a possible route out of the impasse. Across these moments, “that thing” connects the narrator’s refusal to name the pregnancy conventionally with the practical search for help and the limits of acting alone. Its significance lies in that combination: it records an attempt to keep the pregnancy from becoming an imagined future, while the diary preserves the changing body and decisions that make the condition impossible to dismiss.
