Was she wrong to out her father?

I finally finished this book: The first half was slow for me--too many details that I wasn't gripped by. I was waiting for more about the relationship between her and her father--and the revelation of her father's bisexuality (which, in a way, corresponded with her own . . . reminding me of Alison Bechdel's brilliant graphic memoir).

I was very moved by the second half--and saw the whole book as a complicated homage to her father, as well as an important exploration of sexuality in relationship to religion.

Of course this is very complicated since she "outs" her father. He was a well-known New York Episcopal bishop who fathered 7 children and had been having sex surreptitiously with men for most of his life. Moore demonstrates what a toll this hidden life took on both her father and his family.

And yet she also points out how this hidden anguish made him in many ways more compassionate and progressive. I love that take because so often suppressed or hidden gayness is portrayed as turning someone into a homophobe. Instead, in the bishop's case--in addition to being harmful, it may have fostered a certain goodness in him. That's a very important story to tell.

Apparently, some of her siblings don't see it this way. Some are upset that she revealed this family secret (even though both their mother and father are dead). They write: "We wish that our sister Honor Moore had grappled, in her memoir of our father, Bishop Paul Moore, with the ethical dilemma of 'outing' a man whose public legacy is great, whose private life he chose to keep private, and whose personal agony often estranged him from many of us who loved him."

It makes me feel they didn't read the book. I think she does grapple with this throughout the memoir, especially toward the end. And yet, I can empathize with the fact that his adult children are very tender about it all. It's hard for those who lived through the stories you tell to recognize that everyone has a right to craft her own version of events. We own our lives and our subjectivity.

Being a writer and a memoirist, I think a lot about the ethics of "telling all." What seems to me crucial is to not tell all for the salacious sake of it, but to write well and deeply about our humanness. That is what Honor Moore has done.

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Listen to an interview with Honor Moore here.

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(An aside: Since I mentioned Alison Bechdel here, I wanted to mention that on her blog she writes about being a dyke who loves Sex & the City--the TV show, not the movie. I was also interested to see that, like me, Alison doesn't like The L Word, which I find poorly written and badly acted. Annie doesn't seem to mind that. She watches it without me. Poor Annie; most lesbians watch it in big groups, but she sits in front of her laptop with an earbud in because I can't even stand to hear it. What kind of lesbian representatives are Alison and I?! Iconcolasts, I suppose!)

I can hardly wait!

Had a great time with Mom. She spent three nights here, and we did a lot together, including a drive through the redwoods, a walk along the beach, the farmers' market, and a matinee of Sex and the City.

On our way to the movie, we told Mom it would probably be kind of "nasty." She said, "I can hardly wait!"

Mom and Annie enjoyed the movie. For me, though, the movie had gotten such great reviews that I was expecting more. It was just okay for me (to quote Randy Jackson). If I had never seen the TV show, I don't think I would have liked it at all. The most pleasure I got out of the movie was the nostalgia of seeing all the women together again. I was drawing on the complexities of their characters from the TV show to fill in the blanks of the movie. The movie somehow felt less edgy and more surfacy than the TV show, with more focus on fashion. Even when the TV show highlighted fashion, those scenes were imbued with more ironic meaning.

This week I plan to plow forward on the novel. I feel like the research has been building up inside of me, and I'm ready to explore some living time with my characters.

In the back of my mind are the fact that an agent is looking at my memoir, a small press is considering one of my novels, and another small press is considering another one of my novels. ("I can hardly wait!" to hear . . . ) But I want to put all of this out of my mind as much as possible and focus on my art. It's too easy to let the business side derail me. The business side is ephemeral. The art is forever.

Sex and the lezzie

Annie and I have always enjoyed watching Sex and the City episodes on DVD, and we're looking forward to seeing the movie this weekend with my mom.

Our lives couldn't be any more different from the lives of the characters in the show. We don't care about shoes or clothes. We don't even like to shop (although Annie likes it more than I do). We could care less about trendy things. I hate martinis. And parties.

We love Manhattan, but just to visit. And when we're there we go to the museums and walk for miles through Central Park and along the city streets in our sensible shoes--not to clubs or trendy places.

Those trappings of the show, while fun, aren't what make it so great. What makes Sex and the City good is this: great writing, rich characters, and humor that bumps up against poignancy. (One reviewer called the movie "existential haute couture.")

There are a lot of lesbians out there who love this show that features four very heterosexual women. Oh, wait a minute--there's the episode where Samantha boinks a woman, but she doesn't like it a whole lot. And there are several gay male characters. Still, the focus of a lot of the show is the woman/man mating dance, normally not a big feature of most of what I'm drawn to view or read. But Sex and the City has four funny, complex female central characters who are irresistible.

And now there's another way I connect with the show, albeit at a slant: Cynthia Nixon, who plays Miranda, has a woman partner, Christine Marinoni. Cynthia was married to a man and then one day it became clear she was with Christine. I love that Christine isn't in the biz. Sure, Ellen and Portia de Rossi are pretty to look at, but Christine looks more like the women I know. Meaning, women who haven't been gussied up by Hollywood.

Cynthia had basically been under the radar until her relationship with Christine was reported in the media. In one article, Cynthia says this:

I never felt like there was an unconscious part of me around that woke up or that came out of the closet; there wasn’t a struggle, there wasn’t an attempt to suppress. I met this woman, I fell in love with her, and I’m a public figure.

I like she doesn't insist that she was "born that way." Instead she acknowledges sexuality as fluid. There's nothing wrong with being a lesbian or a bisexual woman (or a straight chick who loves girls!)--so there's nothing wrong with choosing to love who you love.