Trying to make sense of one's life (and a parent's)

Honor Moore has published three books of poetry: Red Shoes (2005), Darling (2001), and Memoir (1988). She is the editor of Amy Lowell: Selected Poems, of The New Women's Theater: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, and co-editor of The Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt. She teaches in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia University's School of the Arts. She's also written a singular memoir, The Bishop's Daughter (2008).

Honor was born in October 1945, the first child (of nine) of Paul and Jenny Moore. Paul (1919 - 2003) was "the beneficiary of vast wealth." His grandfather had made a fortune in corporate mergers at the beginning of the twentieth century, was a founder of Bankers Trust and US Steel. Paul grew up on an estate with horses and golf and tennis. He was sent to private schools, including St. Paul's in New Hampshire where a visiting priest was instrumental in encouraging young Paul to become an Episcopal minister—High Church Episcopal ("Bells and Smells Episcopal") a form of the church that would be Catholic except for the Pope.

Paul became a Marine captain in WWII, was wounded on Guadalcanal, and met and married Jenny while still in the service. Once he was mustered out, he enrolled in General Theological Seminary and in time became a Father and a father. The family moved to Jersey City where Paul became the pastor of an inner city church that they lived beside. They did not live in voluntary poverty, however. Honor writes that "the life they made in Jersey City was modest compared to how they could have lived, and they made a commitment to try to share the lives of those they ministered to."

Paul was so successful in building the Jersey City parish, he was invited to become the dean of the cathedral in Indianapolis and eventually became the bishop of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. At St. John's, as The New York Times obituary writer reported, "Bishop Moore spoke out against corporate greed, racism, military spending and for more assistance to the nation's poor, pursuing his political and social agenda in both the city and within the national Episcopal denomination. He was an early advocate of women's ordination and, in 1977, was the first Episcopal bishop to ordain a gay woman as an Episcopal priest."

Honor has a sure hand leading the reader through her family history so that we are never bored by the births, deaths, crises, and tensions within the family. It's an extraordinary story not simply because Paul Moore became an Episcopal priest rather than, as his family planned, a Wall Street banker or lawyer or because he had nine children. It's exceptional because he was gay. Or, if not gay, bisexual.

In The Bishop's Daughter, one senses Honor attempting to make sense of her father and her mother and herself as she writes. She is fairly candid about her own sex life: She was first sexually active with boys and men, then for twenty years with women, then she returned to men. As a child and girl she struggled, without saying as much, to obtain her mother's attention, but her mother had eight other children who also wanted their mother's attention, plus the usual responsibilities of being the minister's wife. Honor says in the memoir she spent years in weekly sessions on a psychiatrist's couch.

She write about her own discovery of Paul's homosexual desires and that her mother "became certain my father had lovers outside of marriage, and that the lovers were men. She made the discovery, I was told by a friend in whom she confided, not as the result of a single event, but from putting things together—a series of suspicions suddenly becoming in her mind enough of a certainty for her to consider leaving my father . . . " She did not, however, leave him; she died in 1973 and Paul remarried two years later.

For most of Paul's life, being gay was a stigma. The unanswerable question: How would his life had been different if he had not had to live much of it (a major part? an insignificant part) in the closet? Would Honor Moore and her siblings even exist? Unanswerable, and thankfully she does live on through her poetry and this remarkable memoir.