A 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 connection, 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, that assertion of self, then shrouded in fear and silence, has reverberated throughout her life since. Confessional, angry, nostalgic, questioning, and romantic, the memoir's chronology is one of consciousness. Following the associations of memory, it moves through several worlds, from the New Haven of Yale Drama School and its radical dean; the New York City of theater, jazz, and the Chelsea Hotel; the Berkshires of Alice's Restaurant; Chicago in the wake of the 1968 Democratic Convention riots. To a portrait of the author fifty-five years later, a woman with a sexual past, a poet who determined her own life. 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.