Memoir is rooted in memory, and Honor Moore’s new book, “A Termination,” dwells in its allusive and kaleidoscopic nature.
The termination she speaks of is an abortion, which she had in 1969 at age 23 — a theater student yearning for love and working for radical change but studying administration while harboring a quiet desire to become a poet. Now, 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. She gives us linked associations in lyric prose rather than a straight narrative, with the leitmotif being the abortion and the child she might have had.
Moore drops us right in with her first paragraph:
“Not my lover, not my parents, and they said I couldn’t tell a friend. I remember my terror that the psychiatrist would not believe me. I’m sure I cried. I’m sure I told him I did not want to marry the father and was certain I could not care for a child. All of this complicated further because I’d unwillingly had sex with a man other than my lover, so I never knew who the father was, and there was no way to find out.”
Moore’s was no back-alley abortion. In 1969, all abortions were illegal in Connecticut, except in cases where having a child would threaten the life of the mother. She received one by convincing a psychiatrist of the necessity: “I must have said I was sure I’d go crazy if I had a baby since that’s what I assumed you needed to say to get what was called a therapeutic abortion. I must also have said I didn’t want to tell my parents.”
Moore became the poet and writer she longed for, and with sentences like this, you can see why: “It amazes me I didn’t tell anyone. I made the decision by myself. But also with the remote-control help of my mother: Don’t come home pregnant.”
She never claims to be the victim, however. “I didn’t think about I’m having an abortion, I just did it. Blasted through fear: I want this life, not that life.” And later, “I do not remember when my choice became a decision.”
Nonetheless, Moore gives life to the baby she might have had, imagining a son and conversing with him at various times. In one chapter, she writes two scenarios. The first is where she tells him that she and his father loved each other very much, but then they broke up and didn’t see each other again for a very long time.
Then she puts forth:
“Or I sit at the small table opposite my son and say, So, it’s time for me to tell you about your birth, and then I tell him about myself as a young woman, about loving L and about my naive encounter with the photographer, including that I thought seeing myself nude in photographs might reassure me about my body. What is he supposed to do with that? I want him to understand I did not know how to take care of myself. He was sort of a friend and I wasn’t attracted to him, I say; but before he took the photos, we drank scotch and I had my clothes off for the camera and we had sex that I didn’t want.”
Although she thinks about it, Moore doesn’t lament not having a child:
“There is a way I can speak that is stentorian, and when I do, I am not present: I never wanted to be a mother. Distinct from: I didn’t want a child.
I did not understand what it felt like to want a child.
I did not grieve the loss of my pregnancy, but I did grieve the loss of a younger self who had not yet made a momentous decision on her own behalf. A termination. A loss of innocence?”
Moore includes people’s reactions to her writing this memoir and what these conversations evoked. With a friend who tells her she wouldn’t have had an abortion:
“It was my first autonomous decision, I said, unsettled by her declaration. That’s what I’m writing about.
You were autonomous when you slept with the man who got you pregnant. She says this as a challenge. Almost hostile, which I know because my chest seizes, and my mind does that thing again, pieces of thinking clanging against one another, making what has been clear, blur and fog.”
At the same time, Moore owns what she chose to do and speaks to the larger contemporary political context: “Choice. I prefer the word decision, its etymology containing ancient words for strike down, slay, stab, cut. But the syllable also occurs in incisor, the cutting tooth. It is the privilege to be incisive that has been taken away.” “A Termination” is a way to take that power by making public what she had chosen to hide out of fear. She poignantly writes:
“What is it that remains unsaid?
At a table in late autumn, I make my way through what I have written here. Interesting how I can’t remember the beginning when I reach the end. It’s always that way, how you’re tossed forward to start again.
I did not tell, begins this book.
I’m telling you, ends the long-ago poem.”
“A Termination,” Honor Moore, A Public Space, $20. Available August 27 at Edgartown Books. Honor Moore will speak with Carol Gilligan at the West Tisbury library on Wednesday, August 7, at 4:30 pm and offer a writing workshop at Islanders Write on Monday, August 19. Both events are free to attend.
