by Honor Moore
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. In the prologue, Honor Moore writes, “it took me decades to escape the enchantment of my father’s priesthood.” How does Honor describe this feeling of enchantment, and how does it change as she grows up?
2. In crafting the book’s prologue, Honor includes a scene that depicts her childhood perspective of her father, along with a brief conversation she had with him shortly before his death. Why do you think Honor chose to juxtapose these two scenes?
3. Honor notes that her father, Paul Moore, was born as “the beneficiary of vast wealth”—a fortune his grandfather, as “one of the Moore brothers,” made through corporate mergers in Chicago in the early twentieth century. Her mother, on the other hand, came from wealthy roots but was also the daughter of a pioneering American female artist, the painter and sculptor Margarett Sargent. What role do these two influences—wealth and art—play in the lives Honor’s parents lead, and how do Paul and Jenny Moore try to control their influence? Does Honor suggest a parallel between her life as an artist and her father’s vocation as a priest?
4. Her father tells Honor that his primary reason for joining the priesthood was to satisfy his longing to celebrate the Eucharist. And yet, like his friend Dorothy Day, Paul Moore’s spirituality seems grounded in an effort to solve concrete problems of living. How did Paul Moore directly engage his ministry with the world, and how did it make him a household name in the Episcopal Church and later in the city of New York? How does Honor view the differences between her father’s personal spirituality and his practicality as a civic-minded religious leader?
5. Honor describes her years in Jersey City as the best time of her childhood. What about this period in her life does she grow to cherish? What influence does her time there seem to have on her later life?
6. What effect does Nona Clarke have on Honor during Honor’s trip to Europe as a college student? How does Nona complicate Honor’s view of her father both in 1967 and later, when Honor sees her in Switzerland after nearly forty years have passed? How does Honor seem to view Nona’s assessment of her “wonderful” life?
7. What role do letters and letter-writing play in The Bishop’s Daughter? What does Honor mean when she describes the letters between her parents as “unrevised by the decades”? How would your understanding of the book be different if Honor had chosen not to include excerpts from letters?
8. Besides her parents, what are the other major influences on Honor during high school and college? What factors does she cite in the emergence of her political and sexual consciousness in the 1960s and ’70s? What is the importance of theater to Honor’s life when she is a young adult?
9. Why does Honor remember the dinner she had with her father on 8th Street in 1970—when she was twenty-four and he was forty-nine—so vividly? What role does psychotherapy play in Honor’s relationship with her father when she is an adult?
10. How does Honor describe the memory of finding in her father’s study a book of photographs open to a page depicting a naked young man? Later, when she finally learns of her father’s affairs with men, how does Honor react? Why is Honor “furious” when she reads a copy of her father’s book Presences?
11. How does Honor’s relationship with her mother evolve after her parents’ separation? How does Honor feel as her mother begins to open up to her about sexuality and her marriage with Honor’s father?
12. After her mother died, Honor turned the experience into art, writing poetry and the play Mourning Pictures. How does Honor describe these artistic endeavors in relation to her grief over her mother’s death? What is the effect on Honor of the critical failure of Mourning Pictures on Broadway?
13. Honor writes, “in 1974, I found myself in a dream realm of women.” Later, she writes of trying to “establish myself in a new sexuality.” What is the relationship between the awakening of Honor’s feminism and her same-sex love affairs? How do both Honor and Paul Moore’s sexual lives operate outside the boundaries of traditional sexual labels such as “gay” and “straight”?
14. How does Andrew Verver and what he reveals about his relationship with Paul Moore affect Honor’s understanding of her father’s sexuality? How does Emma Black further complicate this picture? Does Honor reach any conclusions about her father’s sexuality?
15. The book’s dedication reads: “For my siblings, each of whom would have another story.” What does this dedication suggest about the story Honor presents in The Bishop’s Daughter and the nature of self and memory?
ABOUT HONOR MOORE
Honor Moore is the award-winning author of three collections of poems, Red Shoes (2005), Darling (2001), and Memoir (1988). She is the author of the biography The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter (1996), which was a New York Times Notable Book and published in a new edition by W. W. Norton in 2009, and of the play Mourning Pictures (1974), produced on Broadway. She coedited The Stray Dog Cabaret, a collection of translations of the Russian Modernist poets by Paul Schmidt (2006), and edited Poems from the Women’s Movement (2009) and Amy Lowell: Selected Poems (2004), both for the Library of America. Since 2000, she has taught in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia University School of the Arts, and from 2000 to 2006 served on the board of PEN American Center. She lives in New York City.
HONOR MOORE’S SUGGESTIONS
FOR FURTHER READING
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
The Border of Truth by Victoria Redel
The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
My Father and Myself by J. R. Ackerley
FIND MORE READING GROUP GUIDES
AT www.wwnorton.com
More praise for
THE BISHOP’S DAUGHTER
“The Bishop’s Daughter is a celebration of Paul Moore’s life and of Honor Moore’s honesty. Paul is a sympathetic figure, more human and fallible and somehow more noble than if we had simply been left with the picture of him as the powerful and renowned bishop of New York. . . . One feels that both Paul Moore and his daughter have been set free by this book. There is no shame left, and neither is there blame.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“The Bishop’s Daughter is both a probing autobiography and forthright reflection on a man who, for all his flaws, inspired his daughter to understand him. Eloquently summing up her father’s inner life, she comes to realize that his power derived from a shadowy existence that both tormented and inspired him. . . . The Bishop’s Daughter . . . tells us much about the willingness of daughters and sons to confront complex emotional truths. We owe our fathers nothing less.”
—Newsday
“Moore backed away from his gilded pedigree . . . to become a champion of the poor, a civil rights crusader in the Johnson era, and ultimately Episcopal Bishop of New York. But the life of this charismatic reformer was also a reliquary of secrets, which his eldest daughter, poet and biographer Honor Moore, opens up with grace and urgency in her memoir. . . . Prose as emotionally resonant as a confession. It’s brave to open up old wounds; braver still to help them heal.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“An indelible portrait of a charismatic religious leader. . . . 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.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The Bishop’s Daughter is an eloquent argument for speaking even the most difficult truths.”
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p; —New York Times Book Review
“A powerful memoir of life with an accomplished but secretly tortured father. . . . Poet and playwright Moore, 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. . . . A moving prose poem about what it means to be spiritual, sexual and human.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“[A] galvanizing portrait. . . . Entwining candid reminiscences with the fruits of often unnerving research, Moore creates a dramatic family history that casts fresh light on the civil rights, peace, and women’s movements, and the corresponding evolution of the Episcopalian Church. But the blazing heart of the book is the revelation of her father’s secret homosexual affairs. As Moore struggles to recalibrate her understanding of her confounding parents, she revisits her own relationships with both men and women. The result is a generous and thought-provoking chronicle of public altruism and private betrayal, high ideals and forbidden desire, love and forgiveness.”
—Booklist, starred review
“The Bishop’s Daughter is an unsparing portrait of a glamorous but elusive father and his daughter’s search for the truth about his secret life and conflicted loyalties. What makes Honor Moore’s memoir so arresting is the effect of the author’s cool and penetrating gaze on her beloved subject. Before the life and book end, the god-like hero of New York’s crisis years has climbed down from his pulpit to reveal the hidden tenderness, joys and fears of his all-too-human heart.”
—Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind
“Eros and charisma. Are they linked? Or does the one masquerade as the other? Honor Moore offers a startling evocation of the malleability of sexual identity, her father’s and her own, amid a vivid recollection of American church life at its high tide in the mid-twentieth century. The millions of New Yorkers (and others) whose lives were touched by Bishop Paul Moore will read this book in wonder.”
—Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography
“The Bishop’s Daughter is much more than another daughter’s story; it evokes a time, a way of life, a habit of spiritual and political idealism. It reminds us of who we are as Americans, who we have been, who we really always were. Honor Moore speaks with the truest kind of love, both honest and compassionate, and allows us to accompany her—and she is an elegant and eloquent guide—on her fascinating journey of discovery and understanding.”
—Mary Gordon, author of Circling My Mother
“What is the nature of memoir, and how does it intersect with history? Honor Moore’s rich and beautiful new book, The Bishop’s Daughter, offers some answers to these questions. Moore’s thoughtful investigations encompass the intimate history of her own family and the philosoph-ical history of the Episcopal church; the great cultural network of the Protestant tribe, the ethics of twentieth-century marriage, and, finally, and most powerfully, the nature of passion. This is a gorgeous book, full of experience, wisdom and caritas.”
—Roxana Robinson, author of Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life
“In part because it reveals an iconic and titanic figure, and in part because its author is a gifted writer with a capacious soul, The Bishop’s Daughter must be a remarkable book. Spiritual, psychological, political and quirky, it is celebratory and revelatory too. . . . It movingly relates the inevitably bittersweet saga of the dashing Yale man, who finds faith, goes to war and lives, woos and weds the princess of his dreams; then sallies forth with her at his side to slay dragons and, sadly but truly, have nightmares. It is most memorably a frank, loving, faceted and fully realized portrait of an inspired rebel, visionary priest and passionate man who deserves no less.”
—Washington Times
Copyright © 2008 by Honor Moore
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton paperback 2009
The lines from “Planetarium.” Copyright © 2002 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1971
by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950–2001
by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Excerpt from “The Tea Shop” by Ezra Pound, from Personae, copyright © 1926
by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
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Book design by Helene Berinsky
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moore, Honor, 1945–
The bishop’s daughter : a memoir / Honor Moore. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-393-05984-7 (hardcover)
1. Moore, Paul, 1919– 2. Episcopal Church—Bishops—Biography.
3. Anglican Communion—United States—Bishops—Biography.
4. Moore, Honor, 1945– 5. Fathers and daughters—United States. I. Title.
BX5995.M69M66 2008
283.092—dc22
[B]
2008001337
ISBN 978-0-393-33536-1 pbk.
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