In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, award-winning author Hester Kaplan chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography.
Longlisted for the NBCC Award for Autobiography
Twice Born
Twice Born, a blend of memoir, biography and fiction, is a moving portrait of Hester Kaplan’s father, the acclaimed biographer Justin Kaplan, who is best known for his prize-winning biographies of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Fascinatingly, it dissects the various personas Justin presented to the world.
In parallel to her Father’s story runs Hester’s own journey of development as a writer and thinker, which begins in the shadows of her talented father and novelist mother. A vital aspect of the story is the effect her parents’ success exerted on her artistic development.
At the heart of Twice Born is the paradox of intimacy and distance. Hester describes growing up with a father who was always physically present, yet one who was emotionally unreachable. His death in 2014 became a beginning rather than ending: standing beside his open coffin, Hester realised he had never truly looked her in the eye. She resolved to find him through the only language they shared: books and writing.
Twice Born’s Afterlife
What unfolds is a deeply insightful exploration of the autobiographical impulse in biography. Hester traces the uncanny parallels between her father and Mark Twain, both ‘twice born’ men who reinvented themselves after traumatic childhoods; both were shadowed by an undercurrent of grief they rarely articulated. She suggests her father unconsciously chose Twain and Whitman as his biographical subjects because they served as mirrors through which he could safely examine his own unspoken pain.
An intriguing aspect of Twice Born is how it illuminates the deceptive nature of memory. Hester reveals a striking moment when she discovered she had invented children for Georgia, her father’s beloved housekeeper, a fabrication perhaps born from an unconscious desire for justice that had solidified into memory. This blurring between what we remember, what we imagine and what we need to be true is one of Twice Born’s most compelling themes.
Perhaps most poignant is the book’s ending: Hester imagines offering the manuscript of Twice Born to her father, the one gesture that might bridge their silence. An act of love rendered through craft, it acknowledges that some distances can only be crossed on the page. As Hester reflects, all lives are mysteries too sacred to be solved, mysteries to be regarded with awe.
Praise For Twice Born
‘[A] deeply moving book . . . Blurring the lines between life and death, fiction and reality, Twice Born is, ultimately, neither Justin Kaplan’s biography nor Hester Kaplan’s autobiography but both things creatively meshed . . . Twice Born splendidly delivers what Hester at the beginning of her quest said she was looking for—something that would, at long last, ‘unburden’ both her father and herself.’
—Christoph Irmscher, On the Seawall
‘Tenderly composed, and when it peeks into the larger world, smartly observed.’
—John Summers, Cambridge Day
‘Formally and emotionally complicated . . . Hester becomes a biographer of her biographer father, hoping to feel how it felt for him to live his life by reading what he wrote of other, more famous lives.’
—Anthony Domestico, Commonweal
‘Lovely and tender . . . The child of a writer has much to write about—Hester Kaplan does so with gleaming insights into her father’s rhythms.’ —Sam Franzini, Jewish Book Council
‘[An] affecting memoir.’
—Sophia Stewart, The Millions
‘[An] affecting memoir . . . Melancholy and meticulously written, this excavation of a literary lineage isn’t easy to forget.’
—Publishers Weekly
‘Written in a rich, evocative language . . . A daughter’s searching memoir, reflecting on the perils and promises of biography and the art of reading the self.’
—Kirkus Reviews
‘Hester Kaplan does with memoir what her acclaimed father Justin did with biography—finds the right subject, makes it new, and teaches us how to write with great compassion and grace.’
—Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
‘Justin Kaplan was a brilliant biographer and a role model for many of us. In this intimate and unflinching look at her oh-so-private father, Hester Kaplan makes clear she has inherited Justin’s genes for understated, artful and illuminating narrative.’
—Larry Tye, author of Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon
‘In this acutely observed, beautifully drawn portrait, Hester Kaplan searches for her eminent biographer father through his work—especially on Mark Twain—as well as through his silences, secrets, and her own vivid memories. And with deep imaginative empathy, she finds him.’
—Jean Strouse, author of Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
‘While the course of a life once lived cannot be changed, its meaning can be, and that magic happens here. A loving daughter draws on a deep well of feeling, and a skilled writer draws on hard-earned wisdom, to bring irresistibly to life the ingenious but wounded figures of her unforgotten father, of his greatest subject—and of Hester Kaplan herself, who is every bit their match. Exquisite biography. Heart-rending memoir. Twice born. Twice blest.’
—James Carroll, author of An American Requiem
‘A magnificent combination of memoir and biography, Twice Born is a work of reconciliation and a resurrection of the extraordinary man who gave us Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and at last, through his daughter’s magic, his own passionate heart.’
—Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
Photo credit: Rupert Whiteley
Hester Kaplan is the author of two story collections, The Edge of Marriage (University of Georgia Press, and Norton), which received The Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction; and Unravished (Ig Publishing); the novels The Tell (HarperCollins) and Kinship Theory (Little, Brown). Her stories and essays have appeared in Agni Review, Ploughshares, Story, Glimmer Train, Southwest Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals and publications. Her work has been widely anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories, Creature Needs, Providence Noir, Beautiful Flesh, and others.
Recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two fellowships in literature from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, she was named Mark Twain Fellow for her new book, Twice Born (Catapult, 2025). Her work has received the McGinnis Ritchie Award for Non-fiction, The Salamander Award for Fiction, among other awards and recognitions.
She is a co-founder of Write Rhode Island, a state-wide high school writing competition, and Goat Hill, a literary production group hosting events such as conversations and panels with authors, agents, and editors, as well as offering workshops, seminars, and novel and memoir development courses.
She works one-on-one with writers of fiction and non-fiction at all levels of experience as coach, mentor, and developmental editor, and designs programs for those looking for a graduate-level course of extended study. She runs writing retreats, most recently in Mexico, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, as well as on-line writing workshops. She has taught creative writing at Rhode Island School of Design, the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, the Newport MFA Program, and is on the faculty of Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Hester Kaplan is the author of novels and story collections including The Edge of Marriage, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories series. She is the recipient of two NEA awards and was named a Mark Twain Fellow for Twice Born.
To Learn More About Hester Kaplan, You’ll Find Her Here: https://hesterkaplan.com/