Books beget books, and we read some because we're inspired by others. That's what happened last summer when I went to hear Honor Moore talk about A Termination at an author event. It's the slender, powerful memoir--her fourth--about an abortion she had in 1969, when it was still illegal unless you could get a note from a psychiatrist, which Moore had the resources to do. At the time she was a graduate student at Yale. Her lover was a professor, and she didn't tell him or anyone else that she was going to have the procedure--in a hospital, no less--on doctor's orders to keep quiet. This celebrated memoirist, whose book about her famous father's secret gay life, The Bishop's Daughter, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, explores what she's thought and felt about the child she didn't have and the hardships of obtaining an abortion before it was legalized in 1973. She writes about the fear and drama of taking friends to their own much less safe illegal abortions. Her story and passionate prose are all the more moving in the darkening shadows of the Supreme Court ending the protections of end of Roe vs. Wade in 2022 and all we’ve learned about pregnant women suffering and dying since being denied abortion care.
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…
A friend who attended Honor Moore's event with me suggested a very different take on illegal abortion in the 2000 memoir, HAPPENING, by Nobel-prize-winner Annie Ernaux. Like Moore, Ernaux revisits an event from decades before, when she was 23 and abortion was illegal in France. (It's recently become a right enshrined in the French constitution!) It's a searing slip of book--76 spare pages--that packs a powerful punch. Shifting from the events of those days to her thoughts about them now, presented in parentheses, it's another indictment of barbaric laws that force women to seek dangerous help for procedures that should always be done in the safety of medical offices.
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her…
On a radically different note is Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel The Sequel, the page-turning follow-up to her 2021 novel The Plot, which Stephen King said was "one of the best novels I've ever read about writers and writing." It's hard to describe without spoilers, but let's just say it's a psychological thriller with a good number of murders thrown in—some are mysteries and some happen right before our eyes—about the long, strange journey of a disturbing life story that becomes the plot of a novel. One of the questions we’re asked to ponder is, "Whose material is one person’s life story?" Another is: "To what lengths will writers go for material?" The Sequel's deliciously wicked main character is a sociopath on a mission for vengeance--or is she a victim getting back at those who did her wrong? Korelitz's ingenuity is that we're driven to wonder this, while we turn the pages compulsively.
'A bookworm's treat.' Sunday Times 'Unforgettable.' Wall Street Journal 'An entertaining cat-and-mouse thriller. 'Daily Telegraph' 'Smart, funny and deliciously dark.' Guardian 'Delicious' New York Times
** Chosen as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2024 **
The wildly twisty and devilishly clever new thriller from the author of the New York Times bestseller The Plot.
Not many first-time novelists get a profile in the New York Times. Then again, few first-time novelists come with the backstory of Anna Williams-Bonner: recent bride of a wildly successful writer who took his own life even as his fame seemed…
The Boston Globe said that REWRITING ILLNESS “will mess with you — in irresistible ways. Despite its scary subject [illness], this chronicle reads more like a breathtaking whodunnit — or rather, a whatdunnit... Best of all, Benedict’s writing sparkles.... Benedict whips language around like a gunslinger.... For all its roller-coaster terrors, Benedict’s story … amuses and entertains, even while we’re clutching the book pop-eyed.... Her fearless descriptions of how every step (and misstep) felt, are mesmerizing.... Give it to friends. It’s supremely worth the journey.”
Thomas Beller said of the book, “Witty, vivid, harrowing, as though Nora Ephron had written a book called, ‘I Feel Bad About My Tumor.'” Read the paperback, the ebook, or listen to Elizabeth Benedict read the 6-hour-long audiobook. Audiofile reviewed it, saying, “The candor and strength she shares in her writing are also depicted in her voice as she recalls her thoughts and emotions through her diagnosis and treatment.”
