November 21, 2024 • 29 mins
After years of keeping her abortion a secret, Honor discovers the power of telling.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I did not tell, not my lover, not my parents,
and they said I couldn't tell a friend. I remember
my terror that the psychiatrist would not believe me. I'm
sure I cried. I'm sure I told him I did
not want to marry the father and was certain I
could not care for a child. All of this complicated
(00:29):
further because I'd unwillingly had sex with a man other
than my lover, so I never knew who the father was,
and there was no way to find out. My lover
was one of my professors. In those days, there was
no taint of the criminal in such a relationship, nor
were they unusual. You could not have persuaded me then
(00:51):
that what I felt was not love, but a desire
to be him, to seize his talent for myself.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
That's Honor More poet, memoist, professor, and author, most recently
of the memoir A Termination Honors is the story of
one woman's choice, the kind of choice many of us
keep secret, and the way that choice ripples quietly throughout
a lifetime. It's also a story about freedom, connection, expression,
(01:25):
and the making of a singular life. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
(01:46):
secrets we keep from ourselves. So tell me about the
landscape of your childhood. Where did you grow up, What
did it look like, what did it feel like.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I was born in New York City, the oldest of
nine children, so I was alone for two years. We
moved to Chelsea in Manhattan, where my father was in
Divinity School on twenty first Street at General Seminary.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
I was born in the end of nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
And then we moved when I was five to Jersey City,
where my parents had what was then called an inner
city parish, with a great diversity of people, many different
kinds of people. And then when I was eleven, we
moved to Indianapolis, where my father continued that inner city work.
(02:44):
When we left Jersey City there were seven children, but
when we left Indianapolis.
Speaker 5 (02:48):
There were nine.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
It was a rather populated and chaotic childhood, but also
very rich, and the church was next door, and that's
where I learned my love of language and music, and
I suppose also an interest in standing up in front
of people and telling stories. My mother had grown up
(03:14):
in a very I mean, I suppose you would now
call a dysfunctional family, but I think that's a kind
of sterile version of it. Her mother was bipolar and
alcoholic and an artist and a great beauty, and she
was brought.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
Up that way.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
She and my father were determined he had the same
kind of wasp upper class, wealthy background. They had this
ideal after the war, he'd been a war hero. They'd
married at the end of the war, and she always
wanted nine children, she said, a baseball team or a
(03:51):
small orchestra. So we were timed more or less every
two years. They were very open and proud of belonging
to planned parenthood.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
And you have to remember then that birth.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Control was illegal in most states, even for married people
until nineteen sixty five, and then for unmarried people until
nineteen seventy two. So they were kind of out there
and they were quite vocal about it. And when my
second to youngest sister was born, the columnist in what
passed for a liberal newspaper and very conservative Indianapolis made
(04:27):
a joke. You know, I understand the Moors belonged to
plant parenthood, but they just had their eighth child, so,
you know, and this.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Was the baby boom.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
And my mother, who was competitive in sports and ambitious
competitive you know, she wasn't mean and competitive, I don't
mean that.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
But she was.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
She played great tennis, She climbed mountains, she rode horses
in won ribbons, and I just think she wanted to
have the most children, and there was the money to
do it, she did. So it was sort of part
of her identity to be this very beautiful woman with
all these children, whom she seemed to take care of effortlessly,
(05:12):
and she took great pleasure in keeping that household and
always reading books and always you know, very smart, interesting,
literary kind of person. In nineteen sixty four she started
writing a book which she published in nineteen sixty eight,
(05:33):
which was a memoir of the life and the world
of Jersey City, and went on a book tour and
suddenly competed with my father for the limelight. And she
was at that point forty five. And then she was
in a near fatal automobile accident which damaged her liver.
(05:55):
She recovered only two two years later have contract colon
cancer which metastasized to the liver, and she was dead
six months after that at the age of fifty, leaving
nine child of the youngest, of whom was eleven.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Tell me a bit about your father.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Well, he was.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Very tall and very handsome, and every Sunday he would
put on glistening robes and speak the liturgy and preach.
And at home he would tell us stories or read
us stories, and carry us around on his shoulders, which
(06:37):
was a lot of excitement. But you know, they were
very busy parents. You know, there was a kind of remoteness,
but he had a kind of sweet, charming, funny quality.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
You know.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
It was a lot of fun until things start to
fall apart.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
When Honor goes off to college at Radcliffe, which in
(07:22):
nineteen ninety nine became part of Harvard, she has a
boyfriend and she tells her mother that they're planning to
have as she would have put it at the time, intercourse,
her mother, by way of offering advice, tells her just
don't come home pregnant. By this, her mother does not
mean don't you dare, but rather protect yourself, your body,
(07:46):
your future, use birth control. In college, Honor majors in English,
but she spends all of her time in the theater department,
specifically theater administration.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
I had a secret wish to be a writer, and
I had taken a writing class and the professor announced
my story as the best of the semester, and it
was actually the beginning of my writing. And I was
also writing, but not studying poems.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
I was a.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Secret writer, and the girls produced and stage managed the
boys plays, and there was no support for me to
be one of the artists. I couldn't imagine it. Basically,
the girls did the housework and the boys did the performing,
(08:36):
much like at home. But you know, I was very
good at it, so it was gratifying. And my memories
are not awful, except for the ones that were awful,
you know, except for on reflection, you look back and
you see what was really going on.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
Right, you just use the word reflection. I kept on
experiencing the past and the present, like overlaying transparencies. And
another guest on this podcast at one point a couple
of seasons ago, said, when you bury a secret, you
bury it alive.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
Oh interested.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
I just kind of loved that idea because it feels
very true to me. But in a way, there's a
way in which two our pasts can be secrets from ourselves,
or secrets we keep from ourselves, or ways in which
we don't get until we can until whatever seem opens up,
and then there it is, it remains somewhat obscured or inaccessible.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Well, when I got to the Drama School, I had
quite a lot of confidence. I mean, the productions we'd
done at Harvard had gotten rave reviews in Boston newspapers.
There had been a review in the New York Times.
I was kind of a star. So I had a
lot of confident. That's when I got there. And although
(10:02):
there had been sexism, what we didn't have a word
for then, the thing of the boys directing and writing
and the girls doing the stage managing and assistant directing
and so on, it was nothing compared to what the
Drama School was like, which I didn't understand quite The
(10:22):
theater administration department was run by New York professional theater
people who happened to be not sexist, so I didn't
feel the sexism there, but the entire sort of esthetic
(10:42):
of the place in terms of how women were treated
that there was, you know, one or two directing students
who were women, one playwright who was a woman per year. Actresses,
of course, you know, because actresses were necessary. But it
was a very patriarchal situation, and it was a little
(11:06):
bit disguised by the fact that Robert Brustein, who was
the Dean, was known as the quote unquote red Dean
because he had written a book called Theater of Revolt
about you know, avant garde theater in New York. However,
he was actually quite conservative in ways having to do
(11:27):
with men and women and having to do with race,
and having to do with various other things. So you know,
it was sort of a culture shock. The phrase I
want to use is put in my place. It wasn't
exactly that simple. I mean because, as I said, the
theater administration people were very supportive of me, except that
(11:48):
wasn't what I wanted to do. The biggest secret was
that I had a whole life, a whole inner life,
and a whole beginning to be a life, and a
whole life with my body that you know, we didn't
talk about those things then. I mean, think about a
world where there had been no consciousness raising you know,
(12:10):
there was now, but that was for our mothers so
we were sort of on the verge of the sexual revolution.
The Vietnam War was happening, which put more emphasis on
the boys because they were in danger of being drafted.
Although I became a second wave feminist when I came
(12:30):
to the drama school, you know, I was sort of bifurcated.
I mean, part of me wanted to write, had this
dream of writing, but the other part of me was
definitely going to get married and have kids and the
rest of it.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
This picture of a future was simply that a picture.
It wasn't a desire necessarily, nor was it a plan.
It was an abstraction, an inevitability. It was what women did,
except that Honor didn't want to be a mother. She
assumed she'd have babies, she assumed she'd become a mother.
(13:10):
So in April of nineteen sixty nine, when Honor discovers
that she's pregnant, this abstraction becomes all too real and
deeply at odds with what she most desires, which is
to become a writer.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Getting an abortion was in nineteen sixty nine illegal, so
it took some doing to figure out how to get one.
And on the other hand, our brothers were getting out
of the draft, and it was.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
An equivalent of that for women.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
There was none of this anti abortion, anti choice rhetoric, ideology, philosophical.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
None of that was in the culture.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
So it was like instant I knew I wanted to
get an abortion. I wanted not to be pregnant, and
I had money. I was privileged and white, and I
was seeing a therapist and had heard about this thing
called a therapeutic abortion, which is an exception for the
(14:15):
life of the mother. And I had heard that the
life of the mother included emotional health. And I had
an emotionally ill grandmother, so I was familiar.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
With my genes.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
And I just talked to this psychiatrist and got the
prescription for a therapeutic abortion.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
And you told the psychiatrist that you were sure you'd
go crazy.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
I mean, he was no idiot. He was the head
of the Child's Study Center at Yale. His name was
doctor Albert Solned. Decades later, I was asked to speak
at Vasser and I was introduced at the end to
this man. It was Albert Sulnan that I I said,
Oh my God, I have never gotten to thank you
(15:03):
for saving my life. I didn't feel I was lying,
you know. I mean I was exaggerating, perhaps, but I
didn't feel I was lying. I knew that there was
no way that I could be a mother. You know,
my mother had had nine children, and I thought, well,
she had one child and she ended up at nine,
what's going to happen to me?
Speaker 4 (15:24):
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
So that's kind of magical thinking, but one does think
that way.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
So we think back through.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Our mothers if we were women, says Virginia Wolf.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
So you know I wasn't going to do that.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
To complicate an already complicated situation. Honor does not know
who the father is. There are two possible men. The
experience puts Honor in an emotional pressure cooker. She writes,
no matter how many times I did the mouth, I
couldn't sort it out. You know, I think so much
of our lives, as we moved through them, at some
(16:03):
point involves forgiving ourselves and coming to terms with all
the selves we've ever been, and in one way or another,
making peace with those selves, understanding those selves. And so
if you're saying to a psychiatrist, I was sure I'd
go crazy, that wasn't a lie. It was something that
(16:23):
you knew that you needed to say to get a
therapeutic abortion, but that twenty three year old young woman
was trying to save her own life, which is then
what you say to doctor Soulnett all those years later.
So that process, what did it feel like?
Speaker 2 (16:42):
I was told not to tell anyone, which I took
to me in any person, including you know, the family.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
I mean, I would not have told my parents.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
We'd never talked about abortions, so I couldn't be sure
what they would do. I didn't think I could argue
my position very adequately, so I was told not to
tell anyone. And the sense I had was that although
this bad legality as a process, Connecticut was you know,
(17:15):
it was the site of Griswold versus the state of Connecticut,
which finally allowed birth control for married people just maybe
three or four years before my abortion, and I think
that he was scared, you know, you didn't want to
lose his license. He you know, he didn't want to,
like have to defend in court what he'd done, despite
(17:38):
you know, the psychiatrist and the this and the that.
I mean, what was communicated to me was somehow if
I told anybody, I might not get the abortion.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
And that was where your fear resided.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, I really did not want to be pregnant. As
I try to explain to people who don't really understand
or didn't live through the sexual Revolution, a time when
everybody was sleeping with everybody all the time.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
You know, it's actually wild, you know. So it felt
like part of that.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
And when I would reach these markers in which I
would realize I probably wasn't going to have children, I
had no regrets, you know, I really didn't. And when
I said I always get sad in April, it was
really sort of thinking it in my seventies.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
I wonder if that's why I get sad in April.
I always thought it was just the change.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Of season, and then it would be sad, not so
much that I didn't have children, but about the passage
of time.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
About who was.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
That young woman who didn't have a care in the world,
who then suddenly had a real care and suddenly had
to make a decision, and who had a rather jolting
confrontation with herself. Her It's like, oh, I have a self,
(19:06):
Oh I better protect this self. That was really what
was at stake, and that was really what I came
to consciousness of I didn't like to say, oh, now
I have a self. It wasn't like that. It was
just I had made this decision. I knew that I
could somehow take care of myself in a way. Not
(19:28):
that I didn't have ups and downs in life, but
it was a real decision for myself on my own,
and in that sense, it was a gift that I
was told I couldn't tell anyone, even though that made
it lonely.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
I want to talk a little bit about shame because
it comes up, and it comes up for all of us.
I think if we're thinking and we're you know, feeling
back into the selves that we were. You write at
one point about being in a zoom meeting. I think
with this biography group that you're part of, and everybody
(20:06):
was talking about what they're working on and what their
subjects were, and you know, you really you have this
kind of like hot flash of shame. We just kind
of don't want to say.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
It, right.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
I'm wondering, and there are other places where shame makes
in an appearance, and I'm wondering whether that surprised you
or where that resided for you.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
I resided in the same place that leaking during menstruation resided.
You know, it's shame of the body, shame of I mean,
what I've come to call it in the process of
publishing this book and talking about this book is I
think it's a cultural silence about the inner lives of women,
including their inner physical lives, and we're just not you know,
(20:51):
it's just not in the discourse. That's why for me
the Democratic Convention, when those four women told their abortion stories,
I thought that was a sea change in the culture.
I mean, that was extraordinary. This idea of a cultural
silence has come upon me in the last month as
(21:12):
I've traveled. What I'm talking about is the shame of
admitting I have a female body in a context in
which I don't feel entirely. It's not that I don't
feel welcome, but I feel other. So that's the shame.
And it's what I discovered in writing the book, really
(21:32):
is that this decision I made was a moment in
my inner life. I mean, it was a kind of
opening to my inner life and the interior of a
woman's imagination and the interior of her body are linked.
And are we going to allow this conversation to take
(21:55):
place or not?
Speaker 3 (22:03):
We'll be right back. When Honor's memoir comes out, she
(22:24):
goes on book tour, traveling in the country to talk
about something that had previously felt verboten, nearly impossible to
talk about. This could have been daunting, it might even
have felt undoable. And yet what Honor discovers while she's
on the road is the beautiful, alchemical, communal response to
(22:44):
truth telling. As Audrey and Rich once wrote about Emily Dickinson,
it is that which is under pressure, especially the pressure
of concealment, that explodes into poetry. And by poetry here,
I'm mean profound human connection.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
When I was working on the book, and women would say,
what are you working on? And I'd say, you know,
a book about my pre row abortion.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
And there would be a.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Moment, and then she would tell me, I mean, this
is ninety eight percent of the time she would tell
me her abortion story. And then there would be another
beat and she would say, you're the first person I've
ever told the latter maybe eighty percent of the time,
but so shockingly frequently that it caught my attention since
(23:39):
the book has been published. It's the lift driver, It's
the woman sitting next to me on the airplane, who
overhears me talking to a friend with whom I'm doing
a gig, and I'm using the word abortion rather loudly,
and she notices that everyone in the plane is kind
of looking strangely at me, and she leans over and says,
(23:59):
thank you for what you're doing. It's like that, you know.
It's reading at a bookstore in Minneapolis, where my sister lives,
and all of us, many of us, go back to
her house afterward. In all the conversations, virtually all the
conversations after the readings have to do with women sharing
their experiences. And then we go back to her house
(24:22):
and it continues. And these are women who know each other.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
I mean, these are a.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Community of friends, and they're saying things that they've never
told anyone before. And so what I have come to.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
Is that every woman.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
It's not about oh they had such a terrible time.
Oh it hurt the next day. I mean there's that too,
but it's more I wanted my life, I wanted my freedom.
It was completely shocking to me that so many people
shared my exact experience. So that was when I started thinking,
(25:06):
a thinking, calling it a cultural silence, and I just
knocked on the door.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
That's how I feel.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
And it's been stunning and very moving to me that
women I've known, even women in my community of friends,
I may have known they had an abortion, but that's
different from what was it?
Speaker 4 (25:33):
What was it that made you decide to have an abortion?
Speaker 2 (25:35):
What was it like to get the abortion? How did it?
Speaker 4 (25:39):
You know?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
And then they always talk about how it affected their life.
I wanted to be a writer. I was not going
to let this stand in my way. I had plans,
you know. I had a plan to spend a year
in Europe. I had a top fellowship in history at Columbia.
I was going to study with Henry Steele Commager. Did
you think I was going to have a baby instead? No?
(26:01):
You know, it's sort of or the lift driver. I
you know, I raised two children. I had a son
at seventeen and a son at you know, twenty three,
and I was done and I came to Los Angeles
from Texas for a new life, and.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
I didn't want another child, you know.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
And this was after she had said kind of when
she asked me what my book was about, she kind
of timidly said, did you feel the great empty news?
After I said no, I did not. All I felt
was relief that I wasn't pregnant. And then she opens
up with, yes, I moved to Los Angeles for freedom.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
I wanted my own life.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
So these are like these real conversations with women I'd
never met.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
How is that sitting with you now?
Speaker 2 (26:50):
It's fantastic. I mean, it's it's a gift, you know.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
It makes me tear up every time I tell someone
about it because it's so huge and it's so much
bigger than me, and I feel honored, privileged that I
have been able to write my story in such a
(27:15):
way that women can hear it.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
I'm so grateful, really, I am so grateful that I've
been able to communicate. And it's a lesson. I tell
this to my students. But the deeper the truth you write,
the more you reveal about the nature of being human.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacure is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(28:21):
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
I did not tell, not my lover, not my parents,
and they said I couldn't tell a friend. I remember
my terror that the psychiatrist would not believe me. I'm
sure I cried. I'm sure I told him I did
not want to marry the father and was certain I
could not care for a child. All of this complicated
(00:29):
further because I'd unwillingly had sex with a man other
than my lover, so I never knew who the father was,
and there was no way to find out. My lover
was one of my professors. In those days, there was
no taint of the criminal in such a relationship, nor
were they unusual. You could not have persuaded me then
(00:51):
that what I felt was not love, but a desire
to be him, to seize his talent for myself.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
That's Honor More poet, memoist, professor, and author, most recently
of the memoir A Termination Honors is the story of
one woman's choice, the kind of choice many of us
keep secret, and the way that choice ripples quietly throughout
a lifetime. It's also a story about freedom, connection, expression,
(01:25):
and the making of a singular life. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
(01:46):
secrets we keep from ourselves. So tell me about the
landscape of your childhood. Where did you grow up, What
did it look like, what did it feel like.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I was born in New York City, the oldest of
nine children, so I was alone for two years. We
moved to Chelsea in Manhattan, where my father was in
Divinity School on twenty first Street at General Seminary.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
I was born in the end of nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
And then we moved when I was five to Jersey City,
where my parents had what was then called an inner
city parish, with a great diversity of people, many different
kinds of people. And then when I was eleven, we
moved to Indianapolis, where my father continued that inner city work.
(02:44):
When we left Jersey City there were seven children, but
when we left Indianapolis.
Speaker 5 (02:48):
There were nine.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
It was a rather populated and chaotic childhood, but also
very rich, and the church was next door, and that's
where I learned my love of language and music, and
I suppose also an interest in standing up in front
of people and telling stories. My mother had grown up
(03:14):
in a very I mean, I suppose you would now
call a dysfunctional family, but I think that's a kind
of sterile version of it. Her mother was bipolar and
alcoholic and an artist and a great beauty, and she
was brought.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
Up that way.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
She and my father were determined he had the same
kind of wasp upper class, wealthy background. They had this
ideal after the war, he'd been a war hero. They'd
married at the end of the war, and she always
wanted nine children, she said, a baseball team or a
(03:51):
small orchestra. So we were timed more or less every
two years. They were very open and proud of belonging
to planned parenthood.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
And you have to remember then that birth.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Control was illegal in most states, even for married people
until nineteen sixty five, and then for unmarried people until
nineteen seventy two. So they were kind of out there
and they were quite vocal about it. And when my
second to youngest sister was born, the columnist in what
passed for a liberal newspaper and very conservative Indianapolis made
(04:27):
a joke. You know, I understand the Moors belonged to
plant parenthood, but they just had their eighth child, so,
you know, and this.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Was the baby boom.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
And my mother, who was competitive in sports and ambitious
competitive you know, she wasn't mean and competitive, I don't
mean that.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
But she was.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
She played great tennis, She climbed mountains, she rode horses
in won ribbons, and I just think she wanted to
have the most children, and there was the money to
do it, she did. So it was sort of part
of her identity to be this very beautiful woman with
all these children, whom she seemed to take care of effortlessly,
(05:12):
and she took great pleasure in keeping that household and
always reading books and always you know, very smart, interesting,
literary kind of person. In nineteen sixty four she started
writing a book which she published in nineteen sixty eight,
(05:33):
which was a memoir of the life and the world
of Jersey City, and went on a book tour and
suddenly competed with my father for the limelight. And she
was at that point forty five. And then she was
in a near fatal automobile accident which damaged her liver.
(05:55):
She recovered only two two years later have contract colon
cancer which metastasized to the liver, and she was dead
six months after that at the age of fifty, leaving
nine child of the youngest, of whom was eleven.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Tell me a bit about your father.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
Well, he was.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Very tall and very handsome, and every Sunday he would
put on glistening robes and speak the liturgy and preach.
And at home he would tell us stories or read
us stories, and carry us around on his shoulders, which
(06:37):
was a lot of excitement. But you know, they were
very busy parents. You know, there was a kind of remoteness,
but he had a kind of sweet, charming, funny quality.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
You know.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
It was a lot of fun until things start to
fall apart.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
When Honor goes off to college at Radcliffe, which in
(07:22):
nineteen ninety nine became part of Harvard, she has a
boyfriend and she tells her mother that they're planning to
have as she would have put it at the time, intercourse,
her mother, by way of offering advice, tells her just
don't come home pregnant. By this, her mother does not
mean don't you dare, but rather protect yourself, your body,
(07:46):
your future, use birth control. In college, Honor majors in English,
but she spends all of her time in the theater department,
specifically theater administration.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
I had a secret wish to be a writer, and
I had taken a writing class and the professor announced
my story as the best of the semester, and it
was actually the beginning of my writing. And I was
also writing, but not studying poems.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
I was a.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Secret writer, and the girls produced and stage managed the
boys plays, and there was no support for me to
be one of the artists. I couldn't imagine it. Basically,
the girls did the housework and the boys did the performing,
(08:36):
much like at home. But you know, I was very
good at it, so it was gratifying. And my memories
are not awful, except for the ones that were awful,
you know, except for on reflection, you look back and
you see what was really going on.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
Right, you just use the word reflection. I kept on
experiencing the past and the present, like overlaying transparencies. And
another guest on this podcast at one point a couple
of seasons ago, said, when you bury a secret, you
bury it alive.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
Oh interested.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
I just kind of loved that idea because it feels
very true to me. But in a way, there's a
way in which two our pasts can be secrets from ourselves,
or secrets we keep from ourselves, or ways in which
we don't get until we can until whatever seem opens up,
and then there it is, it remains somewhat obscured or inaccessible.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Well, when I got to the Drama School, I had
quite a lot of confidence. I mean, the productions we'd
done at Harvard had gotten rave reviews in Boston newspapers.
There had been a review in the New York Times.
I was kind of a star. So I had a
lot of confident. That's when I got there. And although
(10:02):
there had been sexism, what we didn't have a word
for then, the thing of the boys directing and writing
and the girls doing the stage managing and assistant directing
and so on, it was nothing compared to what the
Drama School was like, which I didn't understand quite The
(10:22):
theater administration department was run by New York professional theater
people who happened to be not sexist, so I didn't
feel the sexism there, but the entire sort of esthetic
(10:42):
of the place in terms of how women were treated
that there was, you know, one or two directing students
who were women, one playwright who was a woman per year. Actresses,
of course, you know, because actresses were necessary. But it
was a very patriarchal situation, and it was a little
(11:06):
bit disguised by the fact that Robert Brustein, who was
the Dean, was known as the quote unquote red Dean
because he had written a book called Theater of Revolt
about you know, avant garde theater in New York. However,
he was actually quite conservative in ways having to do
(11:27):
with men and women and having to do with race,
and having to do with various other things. So you know,
it was sort of a culture shock. The phrase I
want to use is put in my place. It wasn't
exactly that simple. I mean because, as I said, the
theater administration people were very supportive of me, except that
(11:48):
wasn't what I wanted to do. The biggest secret was
that I had a whole life, a whole inner life,
and a whole beginning to be a life, and a
whole life with my body that you know, we didn't
talk about those things then. I mean, think about a
world where there had been no consciousness raising you know,
(12:10):
there was now, but that was for our mothers so
we were sort of on the verge of the sexual revolution.
The Vietnam War was happening, which put more emphasis on
the boys because they were in danger of being drafted.
Although I became a second wave feminist when I came
(12:30):
to the drama school, you know, I was sort of bifurcated.
I mean, part of me wanted to write, had this
dream of writing, but the other part of me was
definitely going to get married and have kids and the
rest of it.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
This picture of a future was simply that a picture.
It wasn't a desire necessarily, nor was it a plan.
It was an abstraction, an inevitability. It was what women did,
except that Honor didn't want to be a mother. She
assumed she'd have babies, she assumed she'd become a mother.
(13:10):
So in April of nineteen sixty nine, when Honor discovers
that she's pregnant, this abstraction becomes all too real and
deeply at odds with what she most desires, which is
to become a writer.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Getting an abortion was in nineteen sixty nine illegal, so
it took some doing to figure out how to get one.
And on the other hand, our brothers were getting out
of the draft, and it was.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
An equivalent of that for women.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
There was none of this anti abortion, anti choice rhetoric, ideology, philosophical.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
None of that was in the culture.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
So it was like instant I knew I wanted to
get an abortion. I wanted not to be pregnant, and
I had money. I was privileged and white, and I
was seeing a therapist and had heard about this thing
called a therapeutic abortion, which is an exception for the
(14:15):
life of the mother. And I had heard that the
life of the mother included emotional health. And I had
an emotionally ill grandmother, so I was familiar.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
With my genes.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
And I just talked to this psychiatrist and got the
prescription for a therapeutic abortion.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
And you told the psychiatrist that you were sure you'd
go crazy.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
I mean, he was no idiot. He was the head
of the Child's Study Center at Yale. His name was
doctor Albert Solned. Decades later, I was asked to speak
at Vasser and I was introduced at the end to
this man. It was Albert Sulnan that I I said,
Oh my God, I have never gotten to thank you
(15:03):
for saving my life. I didn't feel I was lying,
you know. I mean I was exaggerating, perhaps, but I
didn't feel I was lying. I knew that there was
no way that I could be a mother. You know,
my mother had had nine children, and I thought, well,
she had one child and she ended up at nine,
what's going to happen to me?
Speaker 4 (15:24):
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
So that's kind of magical thinking, but one does think
that way.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
So we think back through.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Our mothers if we were women, says Virginia Wolf.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
So you know I wasn't going to do that.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
To complicate an already complicated situation. Honor does not know
who the father is. There are two possible men. The
experience puts Honor in an emotional pressure cooker. She writes,
no matter how many times I did the mouth, I
couldn't sort it out. You know, I think so much
of our lives, as we moved through them, at some
(16:03):
point involves forgiving ourselves and coming to terms with all
the selves we've ever been, and in one way or another,
making peace with those selves, understanding those selves. And so
if you're saying to a psychiatrist, I was sure I'd
go crazy, that wasn't a lie. It was something that
(16:23):
you knew that you needed to say to get a
therapeutic abortion, but that twenty three year old young woman
was trying to save her own life, which is then
what you say to doctor Soulnett all those years later.
So that process, what did it feel like?
Speaker 2 (16:42):
I was told not to tell anyone, which I took
to me in any person, including you know, the family.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
I mean, I would not have told my parents.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
We'd never talked about abortions, so I couldn't be sure
what they would do. I didn't think I could argue
my position very adequately, so I was told not to
tell anyone. And the sense I had was that although
this bad legality as a process, Connecticut was you know,
(17:15):
it was the site of Griswold versus the state of Connecticut,
which finally allowed birth control for married people just maybe
three or four years before my abortion, and I think
that he was scared, you know, you didn't want to
lose his license. He you know, he didn't want to,
like have to defend in court what he'd done, despite
(17:38):
you know, the psychiatrist and the this and the that.
I mean, what was communicated to me was somehow if
I told anybody, I might not get the abortion.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
And that was where your fear resided.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, I really did not want to be pregnant. As
I try to explain to people who don't really understand
or didn't live through the sexual Revolution, a time when
everybody was sleeping with everybody all the time.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
You know, it's actually wild, you know. So it felt
like part of that.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
And when I would reach these markers in which I
would realize I probably wasn't going to have children, I
had no regrets, you know, I really didn't. And when
I said I always get sad in April, it was
really sort of thinking it in my seventies.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
I wonder if that's why I get sad in April.
I always thought it was just the change.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Of season, and then it would be sad, not so
much that I didn't have children, but about the passage
of time.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
About who was.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
That young woman who didn't have a care in the world,
who then suddenly had a real care and suddenly had
to make a decision, and who had a rather jolting
confrontation with herself. Her It's like, oh, I have a self,
(19:06):
Oh I better protect this self. That was really what
was at stake, and that was really what I came
to consciousness of I didn't like to say, oh, now
I have a self. It wasn't like that. It was
just I had made this decision. I knew that I
could somehow take care of myself in a way. Not
(19:28):
that I didn't have ups and downs in life, but
it was a real decision for myself on my own,
and in that sense, it was a gift that I
was told I couldn't tell anyone, even though that made
it lonely.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
I want to talk a little bit about shame because
it comes up, and it comes up for all of us.
I think if we're thinking and we're you know, feeling
back into the selves that we were. You write at
one point about being in a zoom meeting. I think
with this biography group that you're part of, and everybody
(20:06):
was talking about what they're working on and what their
subjects were, and you know, you really you have this
kind of like hot flash of shame. We just kind
of don't want to say.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
It, right.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
I'm wondering, and there are other places where shame makes
in an appearance, and I'm wondering whether that surprised you
or where that resided for you.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
I resided in the same place that leaking during menstruation resided.
You know, it's shame of the body, shame of I mean,
what I've come to call it in the process of
publishing this book and talking about this book is I
think it's a cultural silence about the inner lives of women,
including their inner physical lives, and we're just not you know,
(20:51):
it's just not in the discourse. That's why for me
the Democratic Convention, when those four women told their abortion stories,
I thought that was a sea change in the culture.
I mean, that was extraordinary. This idea of a cultural
silence has come upon me in the last month as
(21:12):
I've traveled. What I'm talking about is the shame of
admitting I have a female body in a context in
which I don't feel entirely. It's not that I don't
feel welcome, but I feel other. So that's the shame.
And it's what I discovered in writing the book, really
(21:32):
is that this decision I made was a moment in
my inner life. I mean, it was a kind of
opening to my inner life and the interior of a
woman's imagination and the interior of her body are linked.
And are we going to allow this conversation to take
(21:55):
place or not?
Speaker 3 (22:03):
We'll be right back. When Honor's memoir comes out, she
(22:24):
goes on book tour, traveling in the country to talk
about something that had previously felt verboten, nearly impossible to
talk about. This could have been daunting, it might even
have felt undoable. And yet what Honor discovers while she's
on the road is the beautiful, alchemical, communal response to
(22:44):
truth telling. As Audrey and Rich once wrote about Emily Dickinson,
it is that which is under pressure, especially the pressure
of concealment, that explodes into poetry. And by poetry here,
I'm mean profound human connection.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
When I was working on the book, and women would say,
what are you working on? And I'd say, you know,
a book about my pre row abortion.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
And there would be a.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Moment, and then she would tell me, I mean, this
is ninety eight percent of the time she would tell
me her abortion story. And then there would be another
beat and she would say, you're the first person I've
ever told the latter maybe eighty percent of the time,
but so shockingly frequently that it caught my attention since
(23:39):
the book has been published. It's the lift driver, It's
the woman sitting next to me on the airplane, who
overhears me talking to a friend with whom I'm doing
a gig, and I'm using the word abortion rather loudly,
and she notices that everyone in the plane is kind
of looking strangely at me, and she leans over and says,
(23:59):
thank you for what you're doing. It's like that, you know.
It's reading at a bookstore in Minneapolis, where my sister lives,
and all of us, many of us, go back to
her house afterward. In all the conversations, virtually all the
conversations after the readings have to do with women sharing
their experiences. And then we go back to her house
(24:22):
and it continues. And these are women who know each other.
Speaker 4 (24:25):
I mean, these are a.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Community of friends, and they're saying things that they've never
told anyone before. And so what I have come to.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
Is that every woman.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
It's not about oh they had such a terrible time.
Oh it hurt the next day. I mean there's that too,
but it's more I wanted my life, I wanted my freedom.
It was completely shocking to me that so many people
shared my exact experience. So that was when I started thinking,
(25:06):
a thinking, calling it a cultural silence, and I just
knocked on the door.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
That's how I feel.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
And it's been stunning and very moving to me that
women I've known, even women in my community of friends,
I may have known they had an abortion, but that's
different from what was it?
Speaker 4 (25:33):
What was it that made you decide to have an abortion?
Speaker 2 (25:35):
What was it like to get the abortion? How did it?
Speaker 4 (25:39):
You know?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
And then they always talk about how it affected their life.
I wanted to be a writer. I was not going
to let this stand in my way. I had plans,
you know. I had a plan to spend a year
in Europe. I had a top fellowship in history at Columbia.
I was going to study with Henry Steele Commager. Did
you think I was going to have a baby instead? No?
(26:01):
You know, it's sort of or the lift driver. I
you know, I raised two children. I had a son
at seventeen and a son at you know, twenty three,
and I was done and I came to Los Angeles
from Texas for a new life, and.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
I didn't want another child, you know.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
And this was after she had said kind of when
she asked me what my book was about, she kind
of timidly said, did you feel the great empty news?
After I said no, I did not. All I felt
was relief that I wasn't pregnant. And then she opens
up with, yes, I moved to Los Angeles for freedom.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
I wanted my own life.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
So these are like these real conversations with women I'd
never met.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
How is that sitting with you now?
Speaker 2 (26:50):
It's fantastic. I mean, it's it's a gift, you know.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
It makes me tear up every time I tell someone
about it because it's so huge and it's so much
bigger than me, and I feel honored, privileged that I
have been able to write my story in such a
(27:15):
way that women can hear it.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
I'm so grateful, really, I am so grateful that I've
been able to communicate. And it's a lesson. I tell
this to my students. But the deeper the truth you write,
the more you reveal about the nature of being human.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zacure is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
(28:21):
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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