1960s

The 1960s in the memoir are not simply a historical setting but a time the narrator must enter again to make sense of a clandestine abortion. The period is recovered through diary evidence, remembered encounters, and visits to places altered by time. Its significance lies in the tension between an experience once surrounded by secrecy and the later act of making that experience intelligible through writing.

Historical Conditions and Social Position

The narrator places her abortion within a period when abortion and advocacy of contraception were subject to criminal penalties. In retrospect, she argues that the end of legal discrimination does not automatically end silence: former victims may feel that there is no reason to speak once the law has changed, leaving the experience veiled as before. The distance between the event and its narration therefore matters. Writing later allows her to address what happened without relying on the stark political formulas associated with the rebellious 1970s, and instead to attend to the event itself.

The social meaning of the period is also inseparable from the narrator’s background. She was born into a family of laborers and shopkeepers and was the first in her family to pursue higher education. Her qualifications took her away from factory work and commerce, but, in her account, did not free her from the inherited insecurity of working-class life. She understood the pregnancy as a mark of social failure, connecting her personal predicament to a poverty she regarded as a continuing legacy. The decade thus appears not as a neutral backdrop, but as a setting in which class shaped how she understood her situation and what choices seemed available.

Secrecy, Risk, and Practical Help

The narrator’s recollection shows how access to an abortion depended on informal knowledge and assistance. Shortly before Christmas, LB visited after Jean T had told her that the narrator needed help. LB supplied the address of Madame P-R, a middle-aged paramedic who worked at a clinic and offered the procedure in Paris’s 17th arrondissement. She described the arrangements as orderly and hygienic, but also disclosed that she herself had contracted septicemia. The narrator had a penicillin prescription and was told she would need to obtain antibiotics afterward; she believed the precautions made the plan straightforward.

The practical details made the danger concrete. Madame P-R charged four hundred francs, and LB offered to lend the money. For the narrator, an address and the funds appeared to be nearly all that remained between her and the procedure. In retrospect, however, the confidence produced by LB’s survival and reassurance stands against the infection she had suffered and the narrator’s own recognition that the undertaking could cost her life. The 1960s are recalled here through unequal access to safety: help existed, but it depended on personal connections and carried risks that informal assurances could not remove.

Recovering the Period Through Place

The memoir’s return to the 1960s is also an effort to recover a vanished physical world. While writing, the narrator visited Rouen and found its refurbished, brightly colored center difficult to reconcile with the gray, drab town she remembered. She had to work at imagining the earlier streets and traffic back into the present-day pedestrian center. The mismatch between the renovated city and remembered surroundings shows that recollection does not simply retrieve a ready-made past; it has to rebuild one against visible change.

A later visit to Passage Cardinet in Paris makes that reconstruction more exact. The narrator checked the route on a map, got off the Métro at Malesherbes, and walked toward Rue de Tocqueville on a cold afternoon lit by sunlight. At the entrance to the passage, a new street plaque stood above the old, blackened and illegible one. She reached Madame P-R’s building, now locked behind a digital entry system, and walked down the empty street toward a crack of light at the alley’s end. The changed signs, secured door, and quiet passage record the distance between the remembered scene and its present location; retracing the route did not restore the former moment or its emotions.

From Recollection to Writing

The memoir makes the 1960s legible through a deliberate movement between past experience and later investigation. The narrator relies on her diary and other records to establish dates, but also tries to revisit images until they connect with physical memory. This method preserves the strain between evidence and recollection: documents can anchor events, while the effort to inhabit them again remains an act of interpretation.

By the end, the narrator understands the act of recounting as a way to relinquish the guilt she had attached to what happened and to what she had supposedly failed to do about it. She considers the experience necessary to her later willingness to have children, while describing the abortion itself as an extreme human experience involving life, death, time, law, ethics, and taboo. The 1960s therefore persist not as a decade-wide portrait, but as the specific past from which her body, sensations, and thoughts become writing—an account intended to make an individual experience intelligible beyond her own life.