First Things: The Dishonorable Daughter

By Richard John Neuhaus
Friday, June 6, 2008

“Honor your father and your mother.” As the Church Fathers wrote, there are things we know simply by virtue of being human but then, after we alienated ourselves from the source of our humanity, God gave us the Decalogue to remind us of those things. One of those things is that we should honor our father and mother. Perhaps Paul Moore, the Episcopal bishop of New York for seventeen years, and his wife Jenny had that in mind when they named one of their nine children Honor. If so, they have reason to be sorely disappointed.

Honor Moore’s The Bishop’s Daughter: A Memoir is selling briskly. In the long line of celebrations of pathographies—in which children take literary revenge on their parents—a big excerpt from the book was published in the New Yorker, and it has benefited from rave reviews in the newsweeklies as well as in major papers, including two reviews in the New York Times. In a letter to the New Yorker, Honor’s siblings protested, “Doesn’t it matter, even when someone is dead, that his most fervently held private life, and the unnecessarily explicit details of his marriage, are exposed against his wishes? We believe that it does matter, and that both of our parents’ good legacies have been damaged.” the rest