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
2024-04-20
A distinguished poet and nonfiction writer reflects on the lasting emotional imprint of an abortion.
Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter and Our Revolution, was a 23-year-old student at Yale’s drama school when she terminated an unplanned pregnancy. The year was 1969, a time that also saw the emergence of the Jane Collective, a group that established an underground network dedicated to providing safe abortions to all women. Because the author was an “inheritor of minor WASP money,” she was able to get a legal abortion by convincing a psychiatrist that a child would destroy her mental health and paying for the procedure with her own funds. “There were two men who might have made me pregnant,” writes Moore: one a photographer who forced himself on her and the other, a professor who would have married her had she told him about the pregnancy. Early on, Moore unapologetically describes herself as Magdalene. “A taint of accusation hovers when I write about sexuality: She’s had bad relationships, they say. Fallen woman, the woman who sins, adulteress, slut, a stitch dropped from the fabric of society,” she writes. Even though she never wanted to have children, Moore returns to thoughts of the baby to which she never gave birth, imagining that child as a boy. “I was always looking for a great love—the kind that starts at a high temperature and calms over time, embers steady,” she writes. “What would I have looked for in a lover if I’d had a child?” 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.
