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