Termination

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 

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