The Bishop's Daughter

by Honor Moore

Book Overview

Paul Moore's vocation as an Episcopal priest took him-- with his wife, Jenny, and their family of nine children--from robber-baron wealth to work among the urban poor, leadership in the civil rights and peace movements, and two decades as the bishop of New York. The Bishop's Daughter is his daughter's story of that complex, visionary man: a chronicle of her turbulent relationship with a father who struggled privately with his sexuality while she openly...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393335364
• ISBN13: 9780393335361
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A Tale of Love

I happen to have had the good fortune of meeting Ms. Moore in school, many years ago and we have remained in touch sporadically over the years. Can I be objective because of my relationship? Yes and no...I have other friends who have written books and I am predisposed to like them, that said, some I like better then others, reporting to you that I love Honor and I truly loved her latest book. Found it very moving and respectful, not a "Mommy Dearest", loose liped memoir at all. Wonderfully written, evocative, funny and sad and above all written with a full heart. One of my favorite reads in the last few years. Bless her and Mom and Pops too.

The Bishop's Closet

Honor Moore could teach Freud himself a few things about family relationships. The first of nine children of a marriage between a privileged Episcopal priest and his well-born wife, Honor from an early age longed to get inside the dynamics of her parents' life together. Coming as it does while the Anglican (Episcopal to Americans) church is in the midst of a controversy about the roles of gays and lesbians, her memoir is especially instructive about the way sex and gender play out in this ecclesiastical world. It is also a cautionary tale about the ripple effect of dishonesty nurtured in closeted homosexuality. What makes this memoir so compelling, however, is not that Honor Moore outs her iconic father, Paul, the bishop, but her gentle but relentless search for the factual and emotional truth about her parents' multiple liaisons and her own. Meticulously, she recounts her childhood awe of her father's spiritual identity, separate from the one he assumed around the rectory. In his clerical garb, he was apart, but even more than she knew was hidden. The years the family spent in Jersey City during the late fifties and early sixties in a ministry that involved all its members formed her character and created the image of her father as a dashing activist priest aware of the roots of racism and poverty. She speaks dispassionately of the huge family fortune that provided some respite for the family and enabled her father's ministry. He called it his cross of gold. She would say, I think, that the cross he and his family bore was of a different nature. Aside from its political implications, this memoir is a deeply personal exploration of Christianity and the erotic and worth reading no matter what your sexual or religious orientation.

A susbstantive memoir

Of the summer's two "gay Episcopal" memoirs -- the other being Gene Robinson's book -- I found Honor Moore's by far the more substantive. Nearly all of us wrestle with our parents, and the more charismatic and larger than life they are, the more likely it is that this wrestling will leave us wounded. Honor Moore courageously shows us her wounds (and her wonder) as well as her father's complexity and her mother's humanity. Moore opens a window onto the significant social pressures Episcopal clergy once faced to sunder their sexuality from their spirituality -- conservative evangelicals take note -- and this alone makes her book a valuable contribution to church social history. The real beauty of the book, however, lies in its depiction of two parents and their eldest daughter trying to live their lives as authentically as they can. This is difficult in any era, no matter what the current social prejudices, and if none of the three quite succeeds as much as we would have wished, their journeys are no less moving.

A fascinating autobiography written with compassion and understanding

The author, Honor Moore, was born to very wealthy parents. It is no exaggeration to say that she was born with the proverbial "gold spoon in her mouth". Her father, the Rt. Rev. Bishop Paul Moore, the famous Episcopal Bishop who lived in New York, was a descendant of an aristocratic family, and her mother, Jenny McKean was an heir to a fabulous and old fortune. To quote the author: "My father was born in 1919, the beneficiary of vast wealth. He was a grandson of William H. Moore, Palm Beach, where they lived in an Addison Mizner villa, Lake Worth on one side of the house and a wide ocean beach on the other." In addition, he owned a house in the Adirondacks by the lake, an enormous apartment in Manhattan on the eighteenth floor of a building on Fifth Avenue, with a view of Central Park, and a house in Connecticut by the Long Island Sound also. Even though the book is titled "The Bishop's Daughter", it has a great deal of information, both pleasant and unpleasant, about the famous Episcopalian Bishop. The Bishop was wealthy, but he wasn't a happy man. His first wife considered him "the most unhappy man she had ever known." He was married twice, and he had nine children. And he had a lover named Andrew Verver also. Their secret romance lasted over 28 years. With a great deal of courage, compassion, affection, and understanding, the author describes the relationship and romance the Bishop had with Andrew. I was quite moved when I read the passages that desribed in detail their romance. After reading those passages I thought Andrew is a friendly, decent and lovable man. The author was estranged from her father. But she reconciled after the Bishop became ill and he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, melanoma of the brain. After the Bishop's death, she met Andrew in New York to try to understand and also to get more information about their love affair, and then they drove to Connecticut to visit the Bishop's grave. This is a sad and very moving autobiography, written in simple, clear and elegant prose: "He had been a fixture there for years, a giant of a man with white hair, tilting from side to side (he had a hip problem), often walking Percy, his tiny Yorkshire terrier. There was a café on the corner, and, directly across the street, a one-story building with tall windows and what looked from the outside like a vaulted ceiling. It housed a hairdresser who seemed always to have the most beautiful and exotic flowers in his salon." Reading this book will touch your heart.

Fallen Family

A memoir that is religious and sexual at its core -- this is the story that Honor Moore tells of her father, herself and their places in their extended families. A WWII veteran who was convinced that his near-death experiences pointed him into religious life of the Episcopal Church, he rose to Bishop of Diocese of New York. But he was tormented by his double life as a bisexual -- and in a generation, his won daughter would struggle with her own sexuality, starting with an abortion and a non-coversation with the possible father. The book is a brief bio of her father, then of herself, and then of truths coming home to the light of day. A wonderful and honest book for the reader to consume.