A Happy Event

"From then on, my life no longer belonged to me. I was nothing but a hollow, an emptiness, a void. From then on, I was a mother." Barbara is writing her philosophy thesis when she meets Nicolas. Love at first sight in a video store, intellectual and physical passion, shared plans for the future. Then comes the pregnancy—desired, anticipated. Yet, within a few months, the promised happiness turns into an experience no one had described to her: a complete loss of self. Her body escapes her control, her relationship erodes, her identity dissolves into a role assigned to her without her consent. After Léa is born, Barbara observes with a philosopher's eye what society keeps quiet: maternal love is neither immediate, nor self-evident, nor continuous. Between childcare manuals that lie and the relentless pressure to be a "good mother," she seeks a more complex truth—that of a woman who does not give up who she is to become a mother. An unflinching, wry, and lucid novel, A Happy Event breaks a contemporary taboo: that of maternal ambivalence. Éliette Abécassis applies a philosopher's gaze to one of the most intimate and heavily mythologized experiences of female existence. The book was adapted into a film in 2011 by Rémi Bezançon, starring Louise Bourgoin and Pio Marmaï.