The Art of Crafting a Novel: In Conversation with Honor Moore
Honor Moore’s A Termination (A Public Space, 2024) is a powerful lyrical memoir that examines what it means to write truthfully about one’s life—how reflection over time reveals the ways our choices shape who we become. Written fifty-five years after her abortion, Moore revisits her younger self amid the political and cultural movements of the late 1960s, navigating a deeply personal decision that became an act of resistance. The story resonates not only as a lesson from the past but also as a timely reflection on autonomy, memory, and voice.
Moore sat down with Camilla Marchese Gonzalez to share the writing process, the inspiration behind her latest memoir, and reproductive rights.
What sparked the idea to write this book? And why now?
There was a personal reason to why I wrote it, which was that a reviewer once said that in another of my books, I had glossed over my abortion, which she found “troubling.” I looked her up and I found that she was thirteen years younger than me. I thought, well, she doesn’t know what it was like to have an abortion in 1969. Not only how much more difficult it was, but also that the politics and the questions one asked oneself were different. We were living in the era when boyfriends, friends and brothers were resisting being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Getting out of having a baby one didn’t intend was equivalent to that, getting out of another kind of draft.
The right wing had not yet loaded up the issue of abortion with moral recrimination and parental approval—all of the stuff that began in the late 70s and then surged during the Reagan administration in the 80s, has finally come to influence the unbelievable decision of the Supreme Court to knock down what we had fought so hard for. I wrote A Termination before the Dobbs decision, I actually finished it a week before the Dobbs decision on June 24, 2022. So it was written in a different now than the one we’re in now.
In A Termination, you weave a personal story with the broader cultural and political moment. How did you approach blending the personal with the historical so seamlessly?
Well, I have always done so in my longer memoirs. It just seems a no-brainer that we live within our times. In the other memoirs, which are much longer, I would go into some contextual detail about a specific moment. In the case of The Bishop’s Daughter, I incorporated the climate of gay rights and the Episcopal Church, and in the case of Our Revolution, the differences in being a woman at that time. In this book, I did not think it was an option not to include historical and political detail, because there’s no way to write about being a young woman from 1967 to 1970, without writing about the period we were living in. And then there’s having sat in a class and asked, ‘Do you know who the Beatles were?’ I would say most people raised their hands. But if I asked ‘In what year did Janis Joplin die?’ maybe not many would raise their hands. So that’s why I put dates in parentheses all through the book, because I didn’t want to interfere with the intimacy of the narrative, but on the other hand, I wanted to give younger readers a little help in the Googling department. I also didn’t want readers to be distracted by not being familiar with something and taken out of the story. I was thinking of young women as I wrote, as well as of my contemporaries.
The memoir includes imagined moments, like in the chapter called ‘Mama Why,’ where the narrator envisions an alternate life with a son. Can you talk about that choice and how it reflects the hybrid nature of your writing process?
I didn’t think of what I was doing as hybrid, more about revealing the way experience goes. I remember thinking what would have happened if I’d had a child, and then suddenly “he” came alive. I had the fun of spinning that story out. There have been women who have written about the actual physical process of an abortion, and I thought, well, let’s do it a different way. It just came to me, especially with my background as a theater student, to do it that way. Though I don’t think of the book as a hybrid work, that idea gave me permission to tell the story in the most vivid way—by any means necessary. As long as I, as a memoirist, change my contract with the reader, I’m not abusing the values of nonfiction—not making things up.
A Termination really comes out of a prose tradition. It follows the tradition of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, and even Sigrid Nuñez. I think that the fact that I am a poet absolutely informs the writing process. I’m used to writing in the first person, and I’m used to writing freely in the first person, and I’m used to writing lyrically. I also gave myself permission to be totally free—just to let it rip and write whatever came into my head. In a certain way that’s part of the process of writing poems. I’d write for twenty minutes, and I’d get about seven hundred words. I would write fast and not censor myself. In that way, the drafting process was like drafting poems.
What was the revision process for A Termination?
I wrote it in three sections. I printed a section out and put the pages on the floor, and then I would cut them up and arrange them in order and so on. Then I would go and make the document on the computer. I don’t know how I did that!—it sounds like so much work now. [laughs] My draft was turned down by my publisher of twenty years, and many of the major publishers. When it was acquired by A Public Space, I was very fortunate to work with a great editor, Brigid Hughes. We went through the manuscript, I think three times, page by page. And then we went through the galley proofs, page by page. Not everyone anymore has the gift of an editor like that.
Your abortion took place before Roe v. Wade, and the book was written before the Dobbs decision—amid renewed threats to reproductive rights. How did you approach writing about these recurring struggles for bodily autonomy across time? And what advice do you have for writers—or women—navigating and documenting this ongoing fight today?
I would say, allow yourself to feel anger. Allow yourself to write whatever you want to write. Read some of the horrible propaganda. When we fought for abortion on demand, we had no idea, once we got it, that it could ever get this bad again. Having sex on demand, whenever you desire, is a kind of freedom that should be defended. It’s not only about the control of one’s body, it’s also about the control of one’s freedom to desire, the freedom to participate in one of the great joys that creation gave us. I would suggest not to censor yourselves and allow the anger about not having that freedom. But think about what you do with that freedom. In other words, think about what it means to you, quite outside of only reproductive rights. There’s a sort of space to use your imagination in how you approach the subject of desire and thought, reproduction, and your own bodies, and the freedom of having a body, a physical, sensual life.
Honor Moore’s latest novel A Termination was published by A Public Space. Moore’s previous memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and many other journals and anthologies. For the Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement, an Oprah Summer Reading List pick. She has been poet-in-residence at Wesleyan University and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts, and three times the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. When still in her twenties, Mourning Pictures, her play in verse about her mother’s death, was produced on Broadway. The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, published in 1996 and recently reissued, was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives and writes in New York, where she is on the graduate writing faculty of The New School.
This interview series is produced by Camilla Marchese Gonzalez.