Honor Moore's memoir recounts her experience as the daughter of an esteemed Episcopal priest. Her desire to understand her father — a complicated, aloof man — before his death motivated an exploration of the bonds between family. Moore's story begins as she is caring for her ailing father in New York City and traverses the years between the turbulent '60s and her father's death in 2003.

Bishop Paul Moore Jr. was born into a family of great wealth and privilege — a dynasty of real-estate moguls and the founders of the Diamond Match Company. He received a medal of honor for his time in the military, which included a tour of duty in Guadalcanal, and entered the Episcopal priesthood shortly thereafter. The author's mother, Jenny McKean Moore, was also born into the upper echelons of society and was a writer and intellectual in her own right. Both parents were active in the Civil Rights movement, and much of Moore's childhood was spent in the thick of the political turmoil that characterized that era of activism. As an adult, Moore explored her own sexual identity and was on the forefront of women's liberation in New York during the '70s. Her own intimate relationships with both men and women led to an understanding of the psychological minefield of her parents' marriage, which ultimately dissolved due to her father's bisexuality. In the waning moments of her father's life, Moore discovers warmth for a man of great public stature, but who always seemed to be a distant patriarchal figure.

Moore's humble, poetic writing is as welcoming as it is seductive. She offers insight into two seemingly incongruent worlds, vacillating between the ethos of a religious community and the dynamics of the moneyed family into which she was born. In her attempts to understand her own familial relationships, Moore finds a remarkable voice with which to write the story of her life, and, by turn, her father's.

-Katharine Greder