Most of the signs that mark the Continental Divide in Colorado have one arrow pointing west and another pointing east, with Pacific and Atlantic in blocky yellow letters. And it’s not just the Divide that plays at such duality. It was easy, growing up on Colorado’s Front Range, to see things in a simple oppositional framework: There’s this and that — either/or — the Rockies in one direction and the Great Plains in the other. At the feet of massive mountains, the skyline looks simple. But after a short scramble on scree or around a bend, with a thunderstorm setting off rockslides or fire sweeping a hillside into ashes, the entire view changes. Nature’s sleight of hand, which turns excessive simplicity into something intricate and even contradictory in an instant, is also endemic to storytelling in the West.
Pam Houston has lived for decades on a ranch near Creede, Colorado, close to the headwaters of the Rio Grande River. Tucked between the hip of the San Juans and the sharp line of the Sangre de Cristos, the river flows mostly due south toward the Gulf of Mexico, laughing at the binary Continental Divide signs as it goes. This is important. Houston is a writer who clearly takes landscape as her teacher, and the laughing Rio Grande has never been more evident than it is in her new book, Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom.
Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom
Pam Houston, Torrey House Press, 2024.
176 pages, softcover: $15.95
A book on abortion does not enter post-Dobbs America in an election year without a clear aim: Houston is here to make an unassailable argument for freedom of choice. She uses objective information to build out her argument, including statistics on the incidence of abortion both before and after Roe v. Wade came into effect in 1973; a summary of the University of California San Francisco’s Turnaway Study’s findings on the consequences of having or being unable to have an abortion; statements from doctors post Dobbs; and an analysis of the impacts of growing maternity deserts. But she also uses subtle and intelligent rhetorical language to accomplish her purpose, writing with tenderness and nuance and never shunning personal complication.
Her short text consists of 60 micro chapters, which sometimes roll from one right into the next as if continuing a conversation, and which occasionally pick up threads from pages before. It’s a form that is natural to Houston — borrowed from her 2011 novel, Contents May Have Shifted — quick-moving and allowing for sharp corners. She weaves together her personal history of abortion, abuse, gender and choice with topics as variable as climate concerns; U.S. law regarding personhood and bodily freedom; the fallibility of memory; statistics and philosophy; and the relationship between all of this and writing. Her more outwardly focused chapters are gruff and appeal clearly to fence-sitters in the abortion debate, emphasizing the rights of survivors of sexual assault or abuse, tapping the sympathy of the ideological middle, without discussing those who seek to terminate for less harrowing reasons. On first reading, I found myself frustrated at times by this seemingly milquetoast approach to the issue.
Now, though, I understand it to be a sly strategy for expanding her book’s reach. In her more personal chapters, Houston undercuts the simplicity of her “political” arguments for choice, discussing her own history with Husband Mike Number One and Husband Mike Number Two, along with the blooming columbines and bluebells in the San Juans, climate change and the future, before returning to a defense of a person’s right not to have children if she doesn’t or they don’t want to. On the mountain and on the page, she thinks things through, and it gets complicated.
As she’s previously written, Houston was sexually abused by her father for years. The abuse never resulted in a pregnancy, but, after describing the three abortions she did have, all while in relationships with men she loved, Houston takes the time to imagine what might have happened when she was young. In a chapter called “One True Thing,” Houston begins, “I will say one thing with absolute certainty. If I had been forced by the state of Pennsylvania to carry to term and deliver my father’s baby, I would have killed myself.” Only to reconsider, not one page later, acknowledging that “I can’t say for certain I would’ve killed myself because I can’t say anything for certain, which is the beauty of not having killed myself.” This sums up her approach in general: “My primary job as a writer is to hold two or more contradictory ideas about the world simultaneously. This is also my primary job as a human being.”
Early on, Houston writes about negative capability, the phrase Keats coined to describe an open-hearted ability to appreciate the contradictions, mysteries and wild unknowns of life. She writes, “As a nation, since Trump, (and let’s face it, well before) we have suffered, and are suffering, from a distinct failure to employ negative capability in the way we interact with each other and the world.” Fortunately, the landscape of the West has plenty to teach in the way of unknowns and wonder; its time signature changes and syncopates, and this book clearly aims to surrender to such sounds.
Houston is a rhythmic writer who positions this against that not only in her chapters, but in her sentences. She layers sound, as she layers content, to create greater complication. Her this and that change which of their facets face front, adding depth to the book’s sonics and its meaning throughout.
One chapter, for example, focuses on a women-run bison and cattle ranch in southern Colorado where Houston teaches a summer writing workshop.
The women there run the place; they train the horses and fix anything that’s broken. A New York Times reporter came to photograph the ranch for a story and spent an entire day watching the women work before asking, obtusely, “But when do the cowboys come in?”
On the flip side, Houston describes going on a horse trek in Iceland: 16 riders traveling with some 90 horses because they move so fast that the riders have to switch horses every couple hours to give the animals a break. When a woman with her 6-month-old slung on her back asked her au pair to grab the baby so she could fix some loose fence stakes, no one, including Houston, expected to see that the au pair was a “tall and burly man with a Viking beard.” With these two chapters, Houston creates a foil and a mirror. Both chapters call up the rhythm of a trot or gallop, but from one to the next, she’s changed keys.
She does the same thing at the sentence level. In her description of her recovery from her second abortion, Houston writes, “Grief was not one of the things I felt, and I understand this now as self-protection.” There’s a duality here with a phantom on both sides: On the first are whatever feelings — not grief — she felt at the time of the abortion, and on the other is the possibility that, after the need for self-protection waned, grief entered in. This section is quiet, honest. It comes on the backside of the immense gratitude she’s already expressed for being able to have each of her abortions. It’s a complicated gratitude, though, because she refuses for anything here to be flat.
“Grief was not one of the things I felt, and I understand this now as self-protection.”
Earlier, Houston writes about her mother (“Every time I begin a new book, I swear to myself that this time, my mother won’t make an appearance. But here she is again.”) then her father (“And then there was my father, the abuser, also long dead now; the other character in my life story who just won’t go away.”). Her mother always made it clear that she never wanted a kid, and her father should never have been allowed to be near one. She says, “I didn’t want either of them in these pages because to put them here makes the abortion equation far too simple.” And then she lists all the reasons why the equation could be too simple, what her admissions about her parents might invite a reader to think. “As if all my reasons for wanting to control my bodily autonomy boil down to just this one,” she writes.
“They don’t.”
“They don’t.”
Twice. Each its own paragraph.
“But even if they did — ” Again, she goes on, back around the bend, past a mudslide, turning one angle into another, taking another look at every possible way to talk about abortion — through moms and dads, earth and bodies, consumption and hope.
“A book’s first purpose is to lead its writer into a place much more emotionally complicated, much more fraught, more entangled, more layered, more confusing than she had expected,” Houston writes. That she does so in these pages and still ends up with a book whose insistence on freedom of choice entirely backs up its title — Without Exception — underlines Houston’s power as a rhetorician and the inherent integrity underlying the right to control one’s own body.
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This article appeared in the November 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “How to write about abortion.”
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