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.
Slim, searching ... 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.
Moore’s writing is dryly charming, more self-aware than knowing, intimate but not overfamiliar; she comes across as well balanced. Almost polite. Her style seems antithetical to the form of memoir, but it holds its own, not stooping to tricks or whispering to make you lean in closer. Pictorial, not gimmicky ... A beautiful tension to hold.
