Hannah’s Diary by Louise L. Lambrichs. 1993. Translated by Siǎn Reynolds. London: Quartet Books, Ltd., 1999. ISBN: 978-0704380813. 220 pp. Available at alibris.com and other online bookshops.

In Hannah’s Diary, the 1993 novel by French author Louise Lambrichs, the main character, Anne Périer, journals about the dreams she has had since her abortion: “For three nights now, I have been breastfeeding Louise. She looks at me with her china-blue eyes, she seems happy, and last night I dreamed of her laugh, and laughed with her. I woke with the impression that she had come back and that I would never lose her now” (36-7). Louise in the novel is the daughter Anne aborted two months prior to this moment. This French novel may present quite a challenge for many U.S. readers, particularly prochoice readers, because it features the relationship this woman has with her aborted fetus.

Hannah’s Diary is a complex psychoanalytic novel that chronicles Anne’s experiences during and after German occupation of France in World War II. In many ways, this is a novel about being Jewish in that time and place: “Anne” is the name Hannah (from the title) uses during the war, so she can pass as Gentile and avoid arrest by the Nazis. This novel is about the psychological terror experienced by someone who is passing. Anne’s identity at the beginning of the novel is disconnected. The abortion she has in 1943 happens because Anne, as a woman and a mother, is embarrassed to have gotten pregnant when she wasn’t planning to and Hannah, as a Jew, is afraid of upsetting her husband, who thinks this is the wrong time to have a baby. Robert, the husband, is Hannah/Anne’s tie to Gentile identity and, thus, to safety and what passes as normalcy. Although she does not want the abortion, she chooses it.

After her abortion, Hannah/Anne begins to have dreams about Louise, the baby she aborted. Through time, the dream-Louise grows and ages as she would have in life. Hannah writes in her diary, “I have been dreaming about her for almost four years.” and “The disturbing thing is the powerful sense of reality that comes from these dreams. For one thing, she is growing up. I’ve been dreaming in real time, if I dare call it that, from breastfeeding and the first time she looked around, to the bottle, then to solids, her first smiles, her teething and the tears that went with it, her first steps, her first words” (49).

In the U.S. prochoice movement, we have long been uncomfortable talking, or even thinking, about what happens to the fetus during abortion. One of the most powerful tools of the anti-abortion movement has been the accusation that we don’t care about babies, that we kill them. One of the powerful things, for me, about reading this novel was the experience of shutting down my automatic defensiveness about those accusations and thinking more carefully about what it means when a potential life is interrupted, when as U.S. poet Anne Sexton described it, “Somebody who should have been born is gone” (“The Abortion,” published in 1962).

Ultimately, this is a novel about healing. Hannah’s journaling and her dream-time nurturing of Louise are important steps in her healing from the traumas of war and passing as Gentile. Anne’s abortion is not the focus of the novel; instead, it is a metaphor, a symbol of the ways people cope with life when their autonomy has been taken from them. Louise and Hannah’s dream-mothering represent the life Hannah did not get to have and, at the same time, her efforts to reclaim her sense of self. This is one of the reasons I love this novel: for Anne/Hannah, abortion is a gesture of hanging on, doing the best she can, and  at the same time is the starting point for healing. Many of the patients in our abortion clinics in the U.S. feel similarly, I know.