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by Honor Moore
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.
"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 Reviews
"An evocative and candid reflection on the complexities of femaleness and social strictures." —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
This information about A Termination was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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. She edited Poems from the Women's Movement and, with Alix Kates Shulman, the Library of America anthology 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.
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