LB

LB is a fellow student who helps the narrator find practical support for an abortion in 1963, drawing on her own experience of the procedure. She provides a practitioner’s address, explains what the narrator can expect, and offers to lend her the fee. Later, she helps with the narrator’s hospital discharge and joins her in recalling their experiences. In the memoir, LB is both a crucial link in a chain of women’s assistance and a person whose identity the narrator deliberately keeps private.

Identity and Introduction

The narrator first knows LB by sight from a philology lecture they attended together. LB is a small, dark-haired student who wears large spectacles and appears stern; after presenting a paper, she is warmly congratulated by their professor. This detail matters to the narrator, who takes comfort in learning that someone with LB’s apparent respectability and academic standing has also had an abortion. Her example unsettles the idea that the experience belongs to a socially or morally separate kind of woman.

LB is also connected to Jean T, who knows her through the university and later encounters her in town. The narrator has no direct way to reach LB at first, so this indirect connection becomes the route by which help eventually arrives. LB’s role is not that of a professional advocate or a public campaigner: she is a fellow student whose personal knowledge can fill a practical gap that the institutions around the narrator leave open.

The Search for Help

Jean T tells the narrator about LB after describing a married couple he knows whose wife had undergone an abortion. He says the narrator can contact LB through the newspaper where she works as a freelance journalist. Although he has offered to find a doctor, Jean T refuses to lend money for an illegal abortion, citing the moral position of the family-planning association in which he is involved. His refusal leaves the narrator with a name and a possible intermediary, but no immediate assistance.

The narrator begins an anxious search. She watches university lecture-hall entrances at midday and in the evening, hoping to encounter LB, and waits outside the offices of Paris-Normandie on two consecutive evenings. She does not go inside to ask for LB, fearing that she might appear suspicious or impose on a woman whose own experience had nearly cost her life. On the second evening, she waits in the rain, scanning the newspaper displays and looking along the street. LB is somewhere in Rouen, but the narrator cannot find her. The diary records another failed attempt and her growing desperation; at this point, the search has no lead beyond the hope of locating LB.

Advice and Material Assistance

A week or so before Christmas, after the narrator has nearly given up, LB arrives at her door. Jean T has run into her in town and told her that the narrator needs to see her. Sitting together on the narrator’s bed, LB gives her the address of Madame P-R, a middle-aged paramedic working at a clinic in Paris’s 17th arrondissement. The word impasse initially evokes for the narrator the disreputable backstreet practitioner of popular stories. LB clarifies that the address opens onto a main street, replacing a literary stereotype with a concrete destination.

LB describes the procedure in practical terms: a speculum and an Abortion probe would be used, after which the narrator would wait for a miscarriage. She presents Madame P-R as reliable and attentive to hygiene, but does not conceal the danger: LB herself had contracted septicemia despite the sterilization of the instruments. She advises the narrator to obtain antibiotics from a general practitioner afterward for a minor ailment. The narrator already has a prescription for penicillin, which makes the plan seem more manageable. LB says the service costs four hundred francs and volunteers to lend the money. Her help therefore consists of more than reassurance: it supplies an address, prior knowledge, a warning, and the funds needed to act.

The narrator later reflects that LB was the first in a series of women who offered support through knowledge, practical experience, and sound decisions. This description places LB’s assistance within a broader network of women’s informal care, but does not diminish the particular importance of her intervention. For the narrator, the combination of an address and money transforms an otherwise stalled search into a possible course of action.

Hospital Aftermath and Continuing Support

After the narrator’s hemorrhage and difficult reception at the hospital, LB visits together with Jean T and JB. The narrator tells them about what happened in a light-hearted account that leaves out details that will continue to haunt her. She and LB compare their abortions; JB adds that a local grocer had mentioned a woman nearby who would have done the procedure for three hundred francs, less than the fee the narrator paid in Paris. They joke about the hundred francs she might have saved. In retrospect, the laughter marks a temporary release: they can speak together about fear and humiliation, and about having acted despite the risks.

LB’s practical help continues when the narrator is discharged from the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital on January 25. LB and JB take care of the paperwork and drive her to the station. The narrator then calls Doctor N from a nearby post office, and, after returning to her parents’ home, arranges a discreet medical examination and a prescription for penicillin. LB’s presence at the discharge does not erase the danger or the isolation of the preceding ordeal, but it helps the narrator manage the transition out of hospital and back into ordinary life.

Anonymity and Narrative Significance

The memoir withholds LB’s full name. The narrator says that LB is the first of several women whose generosity she wants to acknowledge, and that she longs to disclose LB’s identity and lovely Christian name. She knows that name was symbolically chosen by parents who had fled Franco’s Spain. Yet the narrator has checked the phone book and concludes that LB’s real existence is precisely why she must not expose her through a public book: LB did not ask to become part of the account and cannot reciprocate the narrator’s decision to publish it. The initials preserve both gratitude and a boundary around another person’s privacy.

LB’s place in the narrative also answers the silence surrounding clandestine abortion. The narrator recalls that stories in novels often passed over the practical interval between discovering a pregnancy and its end, while medical texts she consulted described clinical consequences rather than offering the kind of usable knowledge she needed. LB supplies precisely the missing, situated information, but her experience also demonstrates that informal help cannot make an illegal procedure safe: she reports having contracted septicemia herself. Her account offers guidance without turning risk into reassurance.

In the memoir’s later understanding, the narrator’s experience becomes writing so that personal sensations and events may become intelligible to others. LB contributes to that movement not as a symbol detached from her own life, but as a person whose concrete actions helped another woman through an emergency. The narrator’s decision to name her only by initials makes the ethical tension part of the record: the book can recognize the support and its consequences without claiming unrestricted ownership of the woman who gave it.