Honor Moore's relationship with her father, the late Paul Moore Jr., longtime Episcopal Bishop of New York and a venerated social activist, was filled with tumult. As a child, the eldest of his nine, she idolized him for his godliness and good works, but as an adult her feelings for him were complex, fueled by anger and emotional distance.

But when she was in her late 50s and her father, in his 80s, was dying, they gingerly began to discuss his mostly closeted struggle with bisexuality and her own conflicted sexuality. There were missteps, but their relationship began to be resolved.

''Any anger, any complexity, dissolved into a kind of love that was very simple, but was full of resolution,'' says Moore, who appears Saturday at Miami Book Fair International. ``It was a great gift to me, and I was tremendously grateful.''

For years, says Moore, a celebrated poet and biographer, she had tried to no avail to work through her relationship with her father with her writing. When their breakthrough came, ``I finally had a story to tell -- with love. If you love your characters in your story, then they emerge as wholes.''

Her story, The Bishop's Daughter (Norton, $25.95), is a memoir of her father's life, his post-World War II work with inner-city poor as a young Episcopal priest alongside Moore's mother Jenny, and his rise to prominence in the fight against civil and racial injustices in the second half of the 20th century. It is the story of the author's own struggles and her development as a poet, writer, teacher and ``whole character.''

''I needed to forgive my father, do him justice, do our relationship justice, and forgive myself and move on in life doing the best I could,'' she says.

Paul Moore's bisexuality was an ''open secret,'' Moore says. He was married and widowed twice; his wives learned of his bisexuality and reeled. During the bishop's retirement, his second wife told one of her nine stepchildren that their father was having gay affairs -- one of which lasted for decades -- and the word spread throughout the family.

Not everyone was surprised, Moore says. She'd tell family friends, only to hear them say that they'd known about his double life for 20 years. Still, some of Moore's siblings were upset when an excerpt of The Bishop's Daughter was published in The New Yorker last spring.

''Some of them didn't feel that his private life should have been made public,'' she says. ``But I knew it was an open secret. And I knew he wished he could have been completely honest, but he wanted to protect his wife. It was really a generational difference.''

The bishop also wasn't at all comfortable with his bisexuality. ''My father was someone who was struck with how he was made. He was ashamed,'' she says. ``I couldn't bear it. Why should someone have to feel that way about how he or she is made?''

Paul Moore reconciled his struggles with his ministry, however, and believed that they made him a better priest, giving him more understanding to those who also felt themselves to be outsiders. And, despite his sexual conflicts, he was active in the gay movement, Moore says; he ordained the first open lesbian Episcopal priest in 1977.

``My father was not a moralist. He believed in concession. He understood he was a sinner. He preached we all were, and we could all find forgiveness in God, and that kept him going. He struggled through his life, he didn't waltz through it having a double life. He didn't have pat, easy answers about fidelity.''

Moore's memoir has garnered support from a wide spectrum. ``One of the most gratifying things that came out of publication of this book is how many correspondences I've received -- from gay people, parents of gay people, closeted and open gay people.''

After one of Moore's readings, a women thanked her for writing 'the story of a complex daughter and a complex father. I started to say something about powerful men, and she said, `No, no, my father was a farmer,' '' Moore says. ``So it speaks to all.''

A priest once told her that the more people understand about human nature, including sexuality, the more they understand about God.

''That's the spirit in which this book was written,'' she says.

Amy Canfield is a freelance writer in Portland, Maine.

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