Twice Born

Longlisted for the NBCC Award for Autobiography

“Unlike what you get in most biographies, in Twice Born the biographer allows her subject to talk back to her, to engage in conversations they never had, but that are based on her reading of her father’s character. These are some of the most moving moments in this biography/memoir . . . It is like reading a biographical novel that is especially authoritative . . . Ms. Kaplan provides many wonderful scenes.” —Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun

“A subtle and moving work of both biography and memoir . . . In Hester Kaplan’s search to understand her father, she proves both curious and intrepid . . . [She] shows us how the search to better know our departed, if conducted with such care, might actually bear fruit.” —Alizah Holstein, The Providence Eye

“[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

“Part memoir, part speculative biography, part psychoanalytic investigation, part compensatory exercise in imaginative resurrection, Twice Born is a poignant and original work.” —Evan Carton, The Provincetown Independent

“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