A Termination

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe and Publishers Weekly

“Fierce, riveting, and true.” —Claire Messud

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.

© 2026 A Public Space Books (Audiobook): 9798998556395

Release date

Audiobook: March 24, 2026