Honor Moore with Sonora Jha
Monday October 7th, 2024 @ 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Poet and memoirist Honor Moore discusses her latest work with local author and friend of the store Sonora Jha. A lyric, searching memoir, A Termination recounts Moore's decision to have an abortion in 1969—the decision that allowed her to choose a life as a writer. 
 

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 is the author of seven books, including the memoirs The Bishop’s Daughter and Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury, and three collections of poems. She edited Poems from the Women’s Movement and, with Alix Kates Shulman, the Library of America anthology Women’s Liberation!: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can. She lives in New York City, where she teaches in the MFA program at the New School.

Sonora Jha is the author of the novel The Laugher, the memoir How to Raise a Feminist Son and the novel Foreign. After a career as a journalist covering crime, politics, and culture in India and Singapore, she moved to the United States to earn a PhD in media and public affairs. Sonora’s op-eds, essays, and public appearances have been featured in the New York Times, on the BBC, in anthologies, and elsewhere. She is a professor of journalism and lives in Seattle.