Q&A with Hester Kaplan

  

 

Hester Kaplan is the author of the new memoir Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography. Her other books include the novel The Tell. She is on the faculty of Lesley University's MFA Program in Creative Writing.

 

Q: What inspired you to write this book about your late father, biographer Justin Kaplan, and how would you describe your relationship with him?

 

A: My father was a highly acclaimed biographer, and after his death, I was struck hard by the fact that I’d waited too long to ask him questions about his own life and work.

 

He was a very private and shy man, and didn’t talk about his difficult past as an orphan or his feelings about most things, and even if I had asked, he probably would have demurred, evaded, or made a joke. We were always somewhat uneasy with each other, our true selves and thoughts kept hidden. 

 

His death made me see that what is left to those family members who survive is a lot of mystery—stories, chronologies, and experiences that feel incomplete and disconnected, motives that seem hidden, murky, or contradictory. 

 

For the biographer trying to capture his subject—as well as the biographer’s daughter trying to capture her father--this mystery is not one to be solved, but to be explored.

 

Because my father found himself and his way in the world through writing biographies, my book explores his life through my reading his award-winning biography of Mark Twain for the first time. 

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: Mark Twain said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”  My father had referred to him as a “twice-born” man, echoing the idea that a second kind of birth occurs in forging one’s own path and identity. 

 

Samuel Clemens re-invented himself—another kind of birth—when he became Mark Twain, the writer and the public figure. My father did the same in becoming a writer and finding his way in the world. Like Twain, my father didn’t bury the past, but harnessed and harvested its energy for great creative output.

 

Finally, Twice Born refers to my own experience writing this book, as the journey to find my father was always also a journey toward finding myself, the story that made sense to me, and my material in the process.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between your father’s life and that of his biographical subject Mark Twain?

 

A: During my childhood, when my father was writing his Twain biography, it seemed to me that he and his subject had a great deal in common, at least on the surface, things that suggested a kind of magical or preordained connection: three daughters, an affection for cats, a difficult past, a wicked sense of humor. 

 

The connection was, of course, much deeper than that, and my father’s intimate and enduring link with his subject allowed him to write with great sensitivity, psychological insight and empathy about Twain. 

 

In tracing the arc of my father’s life in my book, I found that what he wrote about Twain’s approach to finding his vocation, his passion, his values, and his voice served as a roadmap for his own growth as a writer and a man. 

 

My father, having never written a book before, knew that to write about Twain was an enormous and daunting task, and that Twain might also illustrate how a writer, in full commitment to his vision, navigates between the public and the private persona, the demands of the work and the demands of family life. 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Both my parents were writers and part of a lively and influential literary and social scene in New England for decades. Their friends were some of the most acclaimed writers of the late 20th century, so I grew up in a world of writers and everything having to do with writing. 

 

My parents entertained often, and I read the books of the writers who came to the parties at our house, often wondering how the writer I saw behaving badly was the same writer who wrote so sensitively, how the brute in person could also be brilliantly gentle on the page. 

 

Because of this insider’s view, I was, and still am, fascinated by the challenges of separating the published work from the writer. 

 

I also saw how the life of the writer could be full of triumphs and frustrations, inflated egos and crushing self-doubt, jubilant or despairing at a good review or an editor’s rejection. Present though, in all of them, was their drive to sit down the next morning and get to work. 

  

Twice Born is at heart a book about books, about reading and writing.  Because my father and I struggled to talk about what was meaningful to us, we found a way of connecting by talking about what we were reading, what mattered and moved us. 

 

My book is also about the conversations about writing I could never have had with him when he was alive—about telling a compelling story, finding your material, and staying true to your work and discipline. 

 

I have spent most of my writing life publishing and teaching fiction, so Twice Born, which combines the crafts of memoir and biography, also touches on questions about the role of invention in writing the life of another person.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Hester Kaplan.