Full Moon in Capricorn
"What's that like?" re: Ursula K. Le Guin + a tarot reading to help you with work
I am finding it almost painful to read about Ursula K. Le Guin’s life.
In the 88 years Le Guin lived, to hear Julie Phillips, her biographer, tell it, there’s no real sucker punch, no true rug pulled out from underneath her. On the plane two weeks ago, en route to a somewhat devastating family reunion1 with my husband’s relatives who live on the Blackfeet Reservation, I gasped and swiped away embarrassed tears as I reread the chapter Phillips wrote about Le Guin for her 2022 exploration of mothers-turned-artists2, The Baby on The Fire Escape.
In the section I quote below, Phillips is describing what could be considered one of the difficult shocks of Le Guin’s life, when unprotected sex with a jerk in college necessitated an illegal abortion for Le Guin, who at the time was known by her family last name, Kroeber:
The normally law-abiding Kroebers inquired discreetly in their circle and got the phone number of an abortionist on the Lower East Side. His fee was $1,000—a year’s tuition, room, and board at Radcliffe—payable in cash. The Kroebers were willing to pay it, and Krakie [Ursula’s mother] went with Ursula in a taxi. The office was clean, the procedure professional, the word ‘abortion’ never spoken. She returned to Radcliffe, finished her senior thesis on French Renaissance poetry, and applied to graduate school, all in a state of shock and misery. She wouldn’t fall for arrogance—or for a Harvard man—again.
As a graduation present and to cheer her up, her parents gave Ursula and her brother Karl a trip to Europe in the summer of 1951. As the Kroeber children visited cities, churches, and castles, Ursula started writing a historical novel set in an imaginary Eastern European country she called Orsinia.
I cried over this passage on the plane not because it was an account of abortion-as-trauma but, instead, because it was an account of the opposite: abortion as an occasion that required and received exactly what a news of beloved pregnancy requires and ought to receive: Uncommon love, financial support, psychological empowerment, a gentle “no questions asked” policy on the part of Le Guin’s loved ones, even in the face of dangerous and misogynistic state legal restrictions.