A daughter’s searching memoir, reflecting on the perils and promises of biography and the art of reading the self.
A father comes into focus.
How do you write the biography of a biographer? Kaplan, the daughter of the acclaimed literary biographer Justin Kaplan, finds her father’s personality written between the lines of other lives. Focusing on his two award-winning biographies (of Mark Twain and of Walt Whitman), Hester looks for her father’s voice in the writing. She interrogates his choice of subjects, realizing, for example, that “when he writes about Twain facing east to begin his life as America’s Greatest Writer, he feels how far away the real world can seem when he’s in his study thinking about another life in another time. He understands he has a responsibility to be of the moment, that no art can seal itself off from real life, and that this distancing from the present is a form of luxury that piques his lifelong sense of guilt.” The daughter has learned much from the father: how to craft a sentence, how to find a self in syntax, and how to recognize that reading and writing about other lives helps us to shape our own. Less a memoir of daughter and father, this is really a book about books. It chronicles a highly curated, literate life filled with famous writers dropping by and bookshelves overflowing with tomes. The father’s publications changed his life and the life of his family. In a beautiful reminiscence of a trip to New Mexico together, Hester reflects on reading in isolation, on the power of the landscape, and finally, on how her father’s work (in his own words) “may have less to do with stalking the naked self to its burrow than with the tensions between the familiar, shared life of human beings.” This is a story of that familiar, shared life, written in a rich, evocative language that never bleeds into pretense or pomposity.
A daughter’s searching memoir, reflecting on the perils and promises of biography and the art of reading the self.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781646223091
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Of most interest to dyed-in-the-wool lovers or haters.
“Not a Cinderella story.”
Baldwin’s loosely written memoir is about motherhood and pregnancy loss, marriage to a celebrity, being the target of gossip and criticism, the experiences of neurodivergency and bilingualism, and more. “When Alec and I met, I was twenty-seven and he was fifty-three,” she writes. “Now, it’s nearly a decade and a half later….People always ask me: What is life actually like with seven kids (and an Alec)? It’s amazing and chaotic.” This book comes on the heels of the first season of the family’s reality show, The Baldwins, seemingly designed to answer the same burning question. While the author seems like a nice, well-meaning person, one comes away from this memoir hoping the television version, with the story sculpted by professionals, is the more entertaining response. Given the fact that there has been controversy about Baldwin’s background, perhaps she should have written a straightforward autobiography. But she has not, and the reader might need to do some research to understand the nature of some of the attacks she writes about. The veracity of her Spanish identity has come under fire, as her birth name is Hilary, she was born in Boston, and is not of Latine descent—but you won’t learn those facts from this book. The author’s relative youth, her choice to have her sixth child via surrogate, and Alec Baldwin’s involvement in the death of a colleague on a film set have all been media fodder. She discusses several specific nemeses without naming them, which is not very interesting. “I grapple with the question: Why am I here in the public space? Why am I ‘relevant’? Am I here because an actor fell in love with me? Am I here because I’m a yoga teacher and have things to say about mental and physical health? Am I here because I had a lot of kids?” It’s not clear that she knows, and neither will you.
Of most interest to dyed-in-the-wool lovers or haters.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781668009987
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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