Publisher’s Weekly has an interview with Honor Moore, Bishop Paul Moore’s daughter, whose recent book about her father and family has stirred controversy within the family and within the Episcopal Church and the diocese that Bishop Moore served. The article helps to put Honor’s effort into a fuller context within her own life journey.
From the article:
“In The Bishop’s Daughter, Moore shares center stage with her subject. Intensely personal, this complex family saga is compelling in the contrast between Paul’s public career as a charismatic religious leader active in such progressive causes as the civil rights movement and his conflicted private life.
[…]Moore decided to write about Paul for the magazine the American Scholar, when he became sick with cancer in his 80s. ‘I tried a memoir about my father twice before, but I abandoned it because I had no story. I was too angry, too unresolved,’ she says. Ann Fadiman, editor of the American Scholar, suggested she do a piece in the form of a journal, which was published in the fall after Paul’s death in 2003 as ‘My Father’s Ship.’
This article caught the attention of Jill Bialosky, who would later become Moore’s editor at Norton. ‘I was so struck by the beautiful writing,’ says Bialosky, who’s excited by the book’s prospects. Moore, already well-known in poetry circles as a great reader, is lined up for several appearances on the East Coast. An excerpt ran in the March 3 issue of the New Yorker.
The Bishop’s Daughter can be considered a kind of detective story, full of dramatic emotional surprises, in which Moore pieces together the secret side of her father’s life. One of the more poignant sections chronicles her getting to know a longtime male lover of her father’s in the years after his death. ‘I came to see who my father was in his terms,’ says Moore. ‘He saw himself as a normal person who had a conflict and did the best he could with it.’”
Read the rest here.