TWICE BORN

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.