The Bishop's Daughter

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The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir Pub. Date: 5/28/2008 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

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Overview

A sweeping examination of two American lives lived at the intersection of public and private, The Bishop's Daughter is the story of a great bishop-a man whose life evokes the defining issues of our time: war, race, family, sexuality, and faith-and the personal history, beautifully told, of a father and daughter struggling to understand their choices and each other.

Editorial Reviews

Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Paul Moore and his daughter have been set free by this book. There is no shame left, and neither is there blame.”

Newsday

“A probing autobiography and forthright reflection on a man who, for all his flaws, inspired his daughter to understand him.”

More Reviews (3) Fewer Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Having told the sad, extraordinary story of her maternal grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent, in The White Blackbird (1996), Moore offers a painfully honest memoir of her father, Paul Moore (1919-2003), the Episcopal bishop of the diocese of New York from 1972 to 1989. Educated at St. Paul's and Yale, Paul distinguished himself in battle as a marine on Guadalcanal during WWII; fathered nine children by his first wife, the vivacious Jenny McKean; and became an activist in the liberal social movements of the 1950s and '60s. He also had numerous clandestine affairs with men. While Paul's bisexuality did little harm to his professional career, it took a heavy emotional toll on his family, notably Jenny, who up to her death from cancer at age 51 confided to only a few intimates the underlying cause of the unhappiness in her marriage. The author, a poet and playwright, draws on letters between her parents, the reminiscences of friends (including a male lover of her father's) and her own experiences as her parents' oldest child coming of age in the '60s to create an indelible portrait of a charismatic religious leader who could be insensitive or even cruel to those who loved him most. At the dramatic heart of this engrossing family chronicle is the ultimately triumphant struggle of the daughter, who suffered her own sexual confusion and years of therapy, to reconstruct her father's personal history in an effort to understand his behavior and thereby forgive. (May)

Library Journal

Poet Moore's (writing, New Sch. & Columbia Univ.) 1996 memoir White Blackbird focused on her painter grandmother, Margarett Sargent. This one probes her relationship with her father, Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore (1919-2003). Often controversial, Bishop Moore embraced social causes such as poverty, racism, and gay rights and ministered in dioceses of Jersey City, Indianapolis, Washington, DC, and New York. In these 22 chapters, each preceded by a black-and-white family photo, the author struggles to come to terms with her relationship with her parents as well as with her bisexuality and that of her father. Skillfully interweaving contemporary news into the text, she crafts her memories and narrative from family correspondence and diaries, personal conversations, family scrapbooks, and her parents' own published writing. Religious elements appear as stage settings, which make the book more of a literary execution than a deep probing of her father's faith. Of selective interest for literary and biography collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ1/08.]
—Anna M. Donnelly

Kirkus Reviews

A powerful memoir of life with an accomplished but secretly tortured father. Born to wealth and privilege, a graduate of the country's finest schools and a decorated veteran of Guadalcanal, Paul Moore, the author's father, chose the life of a priest in the Episcopal Church. From postings in Jersey City, Indianapolis and Washington, D.C., he became a leading voice for social justice and rose to minor fame as the Bishop of New York. For his oldest daughter, he remained an oddly remote yet dazzling figure. Only in the last years of his life did she learn of his secret homosexuality, a discovery that explained so much about him, her frequently depressed, occasionally violent mother and the author herself. Poet and playwright Moore (Writing/The New School and Columbia Univ.; Red Shoes: Poems, 2005, etc.), an attentive, sensitive narrator, performs an intensive, sometimes painful genealogical dig on her parents' backgrounds, their courtship and marriage, their work together in the church and their private lives, including many interviews with friends and male and female lovers of her father. She's equally forthright about herself, charting her shifting comprehension of the meaning of her family life, of the larger social movements her parents helped promote and of her own artistic development and troubled sexual progress. In the end she remains too admiring of her father, ascribing to him a kind of martyrdom, conflating (as he apparently did) his spirituality with his sexuality-perhaps a forgivable assessment given its harrowing cost. In 1977 Ms. assigned the still-young Moore to interview her father, then under attack for his ordination of Ellen Marie Barrett, an acknowledged lesbian. Themagazine rejected the piece as "too general." No such objection here. A moving prose poem about what it means to be spiritual, sexual and human.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393335361
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 5/18/2009
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 545,291
Product dimensions: 5.40 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Honor Moore

Honor Moore is a poet and the author of The Bishop’s Daughter. She lives in New York City and teaches at the New School and Columbia University.

Prologue 9

Pt. I Father

1 Prophet's Chamber 21

2 Guadalcanal 34

3 Inseparable 47

4 Holy Matrimony 61

5 Firstborn 77

6 Becoming a Priest 92

7 My Jersey City 105

8 Four-in-Hand 119

9 The Oldest 135

Pt. II Daughter

10 Light and Dark 155

11 Thou Shalt Not 169

12 In Public 187

13 Eager 202

14 The Family Cracks Open 217

15 Killing Me Softly 231

16 Art and Life 247

Pt. III Revelations

17 Women and the Kingdom 263

18 Discovery 281

19 Wayfarers 298

20 Andrew Verver 314

21 Complexity 328

22 Footsteps 341

A Note on Sources 359

Photographs 363

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Anonymous

Posted July 18, 2008

A Fellow 'Blue Devil'

I read this book because Honor and I were classmates, graduating from Shortridge in 1963. One of my best friends was Gwen Solomon, the first African-American Junior Prom Queen. From the outside, Honor seemed to have had a perfect life - the book laid out the truths, as she knows them to be. It is a true testament, to the rest of us, that having it all is not what is important. Being able to trace your lineage,having trust funds or connections means crap if you don't know the truths surrounding you. Each chapter brought a dropped jaw and teary eyes. I applaude her bravery and for re-telling her father's story and giving voice to her mother's side.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted March 7, 2008

beautiful, elegant, important

i had the privilege of reading an advance copy of this book. i think it's pulitzer prize winning material. a really important american story--complex, grand, dramatic, enthralling, moving. i mean, money, sex, god, and glamour--who could ask for anything more? honor moore is, of course, a marvelous writer--and this is eye-popping material. a must read.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted June 14, 2008

Hidden secets

This is an unusual peek behind the Rectory door.
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Posted March 5, 2011

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