Author Honor Moore in Conversation with Carol Gilligan: A Termination
On Wednesday, August 7th, at 4:30pm, the West Tisbury Library presents a book talk with Honor Moore in conversation with Carol Gilligan. Join us for a discussion of Honor’s memoir, A Termination (released August 6, 2024). Books will be available for purchase and signing. Free and open to the public.
About the book:
“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.”
Honor Moore’s previous six books include a biography, two memoirs, and three collections of poems. The Bishop’s Daughter was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was an LA Times Favorite Book of the Year. Our Revolution was featured on the New York Times Paperback Row. She has edited six anthologies, including Poems from the Women’s Movement and, with Alix Kates Shulman, also for the Library of America, Women’s Liberation: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can! Among her awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation in nonfiction and the National Endowment of the Arts in poetry. She lives in New York City and teaches in the MFA program at the New School.
Carol Gilligan is the author of In a Different Voice, “the little book that started a revolution,” and most recently, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (with Naomi Snider). Her new book, In a Human Voice, was published last fall.