A Termination - by Honor Moore (Paperback)

About the Book

"In 1969, Honor Moore was twenty-three, a theater student yearning for love and working for radical change, but studying administration and keeping secret, even from herself, her wish to imagine the world by becoming a poet. There was an older lover, a professor, and, with another man, an unwanted sexual encounter. That spring, she had an abortion. A Termination is the story of the young woman who made that decision, and of how that act of resistance, then shrouded in fear and silence, has reverberated throughout her life since. Angry, nostalgic, questioning, and romantic, the memoir pursues the associations of memory, moving from the New Haven of Yale Drama School, the Living Theatre and the Black Panthers; to the New York City of theater, jazz, and the Chelsea Hotel; the Berkshires of rock and roll at Tanglewood, and Chicago in the wake of the 1968 Democratic Convention. Framing the story is a self-portrait of the author fifty-five years later, a woman with a sexual past, a poet who has made her own way. A lyric, searching memoir, A Termination asks what it means to write with full honesty about one's life--to explore who we were, and how our choices shape and allow who we become"--

Book Synopsis

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe and Publishers Weekly

"Fierce, riveting, and true." --Claire Messud

Not my lover, not my parents, and they said I couldn't tell a friend.

In 1969, Honor Moore was twenty-three, a theater student yearning for love and working for radical change, but studying administration and keeping secret, even from herself, her wish to imagine the world by becoming a poet. There was an older lover, a professor, and, with another man, an unwanted sexual encounter. That spring, she had an abortion.

A Termination is the story of the young woman who made that decision, and of how that act of resistance, then shrouded in fear and silence, has reverberated throughout her life since. Angry, nostalgic, questioning, and romantic, the memoir pursues the associations of memory, moving from the New Haven of Yale Drama School, the Living Theatre and the Black Panthers; to the New York City of theater, jazz, and the Chelsea Hotel; the Berkshires of rock and roll at Tanglewood, and Chicago in the wake of the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Framing the story is a self-portrait of the author fifty-five years later, a woman with a sexual past, a poet who has made her own way. A lyric, searching memoir, A Termination asks what it means to write with full honesty about one's life--to explore who we were, and how our choices shape and allow who we become.

Review Quotes

"In contrast to Happening, Annie Ernaux's slim memoir of a back-alley abortion in 1963, the tone of A Termination is hot and the chronology looping. Rather than a call to arms, or even a lesson from history, Moore's memoir depicts her knot gradually and incompletely untangling over 50 years . . . both Moore's and Ernaux's experiences of abortion show that being able to end a pregnancy can be a necessary condition of women's flourishing."
--New York Times Book Review

"Piercing imagery and ruthless concision characterize Moore's
prose, resulting in an artful battle cry against backsliding into the secrecy
of previous generations. Marked by Moore's stunning balance of compassion and
rage, this is a triumph."
--Publishers Weekly starred review

"The
author's candid, prose poem-like explorations of the ghosts of relationships
past and the complexities surrounding love and sex for women make for
compelling reading. But what makes her work especially affecting is the quiet
way it suggests the possible shape of things to come in a post-Roe v. Wade era.
Haunting and lyrical."
--Kirkus

"An evocative and candid reflection on the complexities of femaleness and social strictures."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist

"This
book is a masterly account of what it meant, in the 1960s, to be a woman of
spirit and intelligence plunged into the particular hell that is unwanted
pregnancy. Both haunted and haunting, A
Termination will stay with you long after you've turned the last page."
--Vivian
Gornick, author of Taking a Long
Look

"This
book is a meditation, back and forth in time, on art, life, and what truly
constitutes freedom of choice. How does a solo female make a destiny for
herself instead of submitting to one? Moore uses feminism, lyricism, and the
hard-won wisdom of aging. She turns the fraught political issue of abortion
into a resonant echo chamber for each of our lives."

--Margo
Jefferson, author of Constructing
a Nervous System

"Fierce,
riveting and true, A Termination is
Honor Moore's memoir not only of her abortion (in the time before Roe v. Wade),
but of the legacies of that choice. A lyric palimpsest of her years and various
lives, real and imaginary, it forms a rich account of self-determination. We
need this book now."

--Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

"Amid a glut of parenting memoirs, here is
what might be called a non-parenting memoir: the work of a woman--herself one of
nine children--who decided to pursue an artistic life without children.
Terminating a pregnancy in a pre-Roe v. Wade America was a private decision
that was full of political consequence, a painful but necessary act of
self-assertion and self-invention that cleared the way for the career of one of
our most essential feminist writers."
--Benjamin
Moser, author of Sontag: Her
Life and Work

"Honor
Moore is an essential writer, her brilliant and multilayered probings along the
vital crosscurrents of our lives--whether family, sex, class, or faith--are at
once intimate and historical, documentary and candid. An account of an abortion
in 1969, at the age of twenty-three, A
Termination continues this enthralling legacy. Here is a book about
the loss of one self, and the making of another self, a self that is also the
making and remaking of a voice. By turns poignant, angry, and mordant--and
sometimes all of those at the same time."
--Robert Polito, author of Hollywood & God

"[A] fascinatingly discursive memoir . . . This concise work is composed of crystalline fragments . . . The granular attention to women's lives recalls Annie Ernaux, while the kaleidoscopic yet fluid approach is reminiscent of Sigrid Nunez's work. It's a stunning rendering of steps on her childfree path."
--Shelf Awareness, starred review

"Memoir is rooted in memory, and Honor Moore's new book, A Termination, dwells in its allusive and kaleidoscopic nature . . . 55 years later, Moore looks at her choices not just about abortion but relationships with lovers, sex, her own body, career path, and so much more, moving fluidly back and forth in time . . . A Termination is a way to take that power by making public what she had chosen to hide out of fear."
--Martha's Vineyard Times

About the Author

Honor Moore is the author of seven books, including the memoirs The Bishop's Daughter and Our Revolution, a Mother and Daughter at Midcentury and three collections of poems. For the Library of America, she edited Poems from the Women's Movement and Women's Liberation!: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can. She lives in New York City, where she teaches in the MFA program at the New School.