the last book I ever read (Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, excerpt four)

from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature:

On December 31 I left Le Mont-Dore with a family who had offered to give me a lift back to Paris. I didn’t join in the conversation. At one point the woman said that the girl in the maid’s room had miscarried, “she was moaning all night.” All I remember about the journey was the rainy weather and that remark. This, and other sentences, either frightening or comforting, mostly from strangers, guided me toward the ordeal, supporting me like a viaticum until I too went through with it.