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Email to FriendMoore's memoir opens curtains on family secrets
THE BISHOP'S DAUGHTER
A Memoir
By Honor Moore
Norton, 368 pp., $25.95
Reading Honor Moore's memoir, "The Bishop's Daughter," feels like being embraced in brocade -- not scratched by newness or weighted by thickness, but enfolded in rich, golden fabric softened by care. Moore is a poet with a journalist's sensibilities, an essayist's cunning, a researcher's rabidness.
The book was excerpted in a March issue of "New Yorker" magazine, so the sensational parts -- her father's bisexuality, for example -- have been screened, but the whole cloth matters so much more than any single swath.
Honor Moore -- teacher, writer and biographer -- is the first of nine children born to Jenny and Paul Moore, also authors. Paul Moore was the bishop of the Diocese of New York, and although he came out to his old-rich, racist, Republican family as a Democrat who cared little about money but lots about civil rights, he could not come out of the sexual closet -- not in his time in the 20th century or his place in ecclesiastical geography.
But this is Moore's memoir, not his, nor her siblings'. Its honesty is subjective, discomfiting and essential. "The Bishop's Daughter" is her story of having but a fraction of her parents' attention (her memories parallel those of Deborah Digges, the poet, who described being one of 10 Sugarbakers in "Fugitive Spring"). It is Moore's frank story of exploring her own sexuality shaded by her family's shackling secrets. "What goes unresolved never loses its power," she writes.
Shrewdly, after the first third of her book, she slips in her families' fascinating pedigrees (family tree as money tree). Being born in 1945 gave Moore the vantage to observe sexual politics, psychology and therapy, and the Episcopal Church. She reports on the percolations of her time and the permutations of her family so finely that "The Bishop's Daughter" is awfully hard to put down.
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