'The Bishop's Daughter' by Honor Moore

A Memoir

Honor Moore

W.W. Norton: 366 pp., $25.95

READING Honor Moore's memoir, a probing account of her complex relationship with her father, the late Paul Moore Jr., Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of New York from 1972until his retirement in 1989, I was reminded of my own upbringing as the daughter of a very different kind of bishop -- one who presided over a Mormon congregation in a small Utah town. Like Moore, I came from a large family -- eight children to her family's nine -- and the church was the center of our life, its rituals our daily bread. Whenever one of us got sick, for instance, my father would perform a laying-on of hands, anointing our foreheads with olive oil consecrated for this purpose alone and, along with two other elders, placing his hands upon our heads and offering a healing prayer. What I remember is the weight of those hands, the crown of fingers upon my scalp, their heat and power and especially their ineluctable maleness. Even then I understood that this was not something a woman could do. Women did not have priestly powers.

Moore also understood what force could flow through the hands of religious men, as she makes clear in this description of her confirmation: "[T]he bishop lowered his hands onto my veiled head. . . . His hands vibrated, seeming, as heat came through them . . . heavy and comforting because they were so big and my head was so small." As she is inducted into the "everlasting kingdom," with everything shimmering around her, she thinks, "Surely this was God . . . the heat and heaviness in Bishop Washburn's hands."

I mention this passage and my own connection to it because "The Bishop's Daughter" is nothing if not an attempt to reconcile Moore's idea of her father as a man of God, possessed of exalted and mystical powers, with the mortal man she knew so intimately -- a father who sired all those children and yet, as she discovers in adulthood, also led a secret existence as a gay man, conducting affairs with men throughout his entire life.

Priest, devoted father, closeted homosexual: It's a ripe combination. When an excerpt from "The Bishop's Daughter" appeared in the New Yorker a few months ago, it elicited a letter from three of Moore's siblings critical of her for outing their much admired and beloved father. Still, what becomes clear in reading her book is how necessary it was for her to tell the story -- necessary for her understanding of her own sexual nature, and also necessary, she argues, for understanding her father's suffering and choices. As Moore puts it toward the end of the book, "I came to understand that my own sexual development was inextricably tied up with my father's complicated erotic life."