In 'Twice Born,' a daughter discovers her father through his biography of Mark Twain

Summary

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NPR's Book of the Day: "In 'Twice Born,' a Daughter Discovers Her Father Through His Biography of Mark Twain"

Host: Andrew Limbong (Intro)
Interviewer: Tiziana Dearing (Here & Now)
Guest: Hester Kaplan, author
Date: January 7, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on Hester Kaplan and her memoir, "Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography," which details her journey to understand her father, Justin Kaplan—a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer—by reading his seminal biography of Mark Twain. Through a moving conversation, Kaplan explores the emotional distance in her relationship with her father, the inherited complexities of grief, and how literature became both a bridge and a barrier between them.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Turning Point: Encounter at the Crematorium

• [02:13–03:25]
  • Kaplan begins her book at her father's cremation, a moment she describes as pivotal in her decision to write the memoir.
  • She notes her father's extreme privacy and how, in life, it was hard to make eye contact with him:

    "My father was a very private and hidden man...it was very hard for us to make eye contact." – Hester Kaplan [02:33]

  • At the crematorium, she finally feels able to "gaze" at him, symbolizing a deeper quest to see and understand him.

2. Literary Lineage and the Elusiveness of the Father

• [03:44–05:18]
  • Kaplan was raised surrounded by literary figures (David McCullough, Annie Dillard, John Updike) and by parents whose identities were inextricably linked to their writing.
  • She avoided reading her father’s work while he was alive:

    "I had never read any of his work until he died." – Hester Kaplan [04:16]

  • She perceived the writer and the work as fused, making it daunting to confront her father directly through his writing.

3. Reading Her Father Through Mark Twain

• [05:18–05:58]
  • Kaplan describes using her father's biography of Mark Twain as a mirror—finding her father by analyzing the choices he made as a writer about Twain.
  • Grappled with feeling unauthorized:

    "I was looking to find these kind of convergences or parallels between my father's life and Twain's life...I was very conscious of the decisions that he made in choosing how to write about Twain and how that might reflect on who he was." – Hester Kaplan [05:58]

4. The Study: Presence and Absence at Home

• [06:30–07:42]
  • Despite being physically present and engaged in activities (cooking, playing), Justin Kaplan was emotionally distant, retreating to his study, an "inner sanctum."

  • "He was very there physically and activity wise. But as soon as it got sort of emotional, he would disappear and disappear into his study." – Hester Kaplan [06:58]

5. Intergenerational Experience with Fathers

• [07:42–08:12]
  • Dearing notes that many listeners might relate to this kind of emotionally-distant fatherhood as universal, but Kaplan cautions against simplification—her father's behavior was rooted in personal history.

6. Layers of Loss & Silence in the Family

• [08:42–09:52]
  • Justin Kaplan lost both his parents by age 13 and never spoke of them.
  • Hester learns, by accident, she named her son after her grandfather—and her father never acknowledged it:

    "I did not know. ...when he heard...that I was naming my child Tobias, he didn’t say anything." – Hester Kaplan [09:30]

7. Grief, Loneliness, and Biography as Connection

• [09:52–11:03]
  • Kaplan reflects on how both her and her father’s lives were tinged by unspoken grief.
  • Quoting Justin Kaplan:

    "Biography is an antidote to loneliness and a restorative of solitude." – Hester Kaplan [10:36]

  • Writing the memoir allowed Hester to alleviate inherited grief and transform loneliness into peaceful solitude.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Seeking Connection:

  "I hope that by the end of the book...he was able to look at me and I was able to look at him."
  – Hester Kaplan [03:25]

• On Reading Her Father's Work After His Death:

  "I think I always had a feeling that where he was the most himself was when he was writing."
  – Hester Kaplan [04:46]

• On Generational Fatherhood:

  "...this is how I felt about my father, that he was. He was sometimes there. He was not there, but that the emotional aspect or the sort of intimate connection with their father was...not there."
  – Hester Kaplan [07:48]

• On Biography and Loneliness:

  "Biography is an antidote to loneliness and a restorative of solitude."
  – Hester Kaplan, quoting her father [10:36]

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Important Timestamps

• 02:13 – The significance of witnessing her father's cremation
• 04:16 – First encounter with her father's published work
• 05:58 – “Unauthorized” search for her father in his Twain biography
• 06:58 – The study as metaphor for emotional boundaries
• 09:30 – Discovery of naming her son after her grandfather
• 10:36 – The link between biography, grief, and solitude

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Tone & Language

The conversation is intimate, reflective, and psychologically astute, with Hester Kaplan articulating the complexities of familial relationships and inherited grief. Tiziana Dearing’s questions are empathetic, inviting, and occasionally direct, helping to surface deep personal insights.

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In Summary

This episode of NPR’s Book of the Day invites listeners into Hester Kaplan’s poignant investigation of her relationship with her father, Justin Kaplan. By delving into his celebrated biography of Mark Twain, she confronts the twin challenges of familial silence and personal grief, ultimately using literature as a means of connection and understanding. Anyone interested in family memoirs, literary biography, or the dynamics of parent-child relationships will find this discussion both moving and resonant.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Dads, man, sometimes it's hard to get to know them, right? Justin Kaplan was a dad. He was also a famous Pulitzer Prize winning biographer. And for his daughter, Hester Kaplan, those two identities never separated. And so even though he was physically home all the time, making dinner, playing Frisbee or whatever, his mind was always on his work focused on the life of someone else. Hester Kaplan's new memoir is titled Twice Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography. And she told Here Now's Tizziana Deering that it was a way of finally getting to know her father through that work he was so focused on. That's coming up.

[B]

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[D]

I'm Ticiana Dearing in Boston. It's here and now. Hester Kaplan grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the child of two writers, Pulitzer and National Book Award winning biographer Justin Kaplan and novelist Ann Bernays. Raised at a kitchen table that featured luminaries from David McCullough to Annie Dillard and John Updike, she herself became a writer. But as she notes in her new memoir, throughout all the novels and short stories, one subject continued to elude her, her own father. That's the topic Hester Kaplan takes on in her new book, Twice Born, and she joins us in the studio to talk about it. Hester, welcome.

[E]

Thank you for having me.

[D]

So you start the book. I mean, talk about a striking way to open a book, right? You are at your own father's cremation because you wanted to see him in that moment despite the fact that many of your family members didn't want to be there. What were you looking for there? And in writing this book, I think.

[E]

That'S a really interesting place to start. Because the idea for writing the book really happened at that moment when I was in the crematory. My father was a very private and hidden man. And one of the things that I'd always noticed, it was very hard for us to make eye contact. And of course, you know, his eyes are not open in the case casket. But I felt that this was a moment where we could be sort of stilled together.

[D]

There is this other aspect, and I didn't think of it till you said what you just said right there. Because this lack of eye contact stayed with me. Through your book, you couldn't gaze at him.

[E]

Right.

[D]

And so in the room where he was cremated, you could gaze. And in the end, what you choose to do in this book is try to take a sustained look at a man that you could never look at.

[E]

And I hope that by the end of the book, through the journey of writing about him and discovering him and thinking about him, he was able to look at me and I was able to look at him. And one of the ways that we were able to connect with each other was through books and through other people's.

[D]

Writing and not just any book. That's the other thing. It's more than a conceit or a device in your book. Right. It is the way you get to know your father, which is through his first biography, by some accounts, his most famous work. About Mark Twain. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. Of course, he was Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain. It was fascinating to me that you had to read his work to get to know him. What made you think that his book on Mark Twain was the key that was going to allow you to unlock your own dad?

[E]

Well, I had never read any of his work until he died.

[D]

Okay, let's stop there. What, what and why?

[E]

I think it's very complicated for children of writers, and particularly the environment in which I grew up. The writer and the work were never really separate. I knew both of them. My parents were big entertainers, and they had a lot of literary luminaries come through all the time. And I would read their books, and I would see them.

[D]

You read the luminaries books?

[E]

Luminaries books. And I would see them interact at, you know, at cocktail parties and do sort of crazy things and try to make some connection between the work and the writer. So in my mind, growing up, the work and the writer were never separate. So I think for my father's books, I always felt that he would be in that first biography, and it was where he didn't really want me to Go and where I was also sort of afraid to go. I think I always had a feeling that where he was the most himself was when he was writing.

[D]

And your book, it's a little hard to describe this, but you do use the things that he writes about Mark Twain. Okay. You take moments in his biography of Mark Twain where it is clear that he is making specific choices about the way he's describing things, whether it's a little bit of Twain's inner life or his attitudes towards his spouse or other people. And. And you read in them a reflection of your own father. Did you ever feel like you were doing something? Unauthorized isn't the word. Did you ever worry you were making it up?

[E]

That's a good word.

[D]

Okay, well, then let's stay there. Did you ever feel unauthorized?

[E]

I did. I was aware from the beginning, as I started to read this book that I was looking to find these kind of convergences or parallels between my father's life and Twain's life and to be very conscious of the decisions that he made in choosing how to write about Twain and how that might reflect on who he was. Because I think he was, as I said, he was a very private and hidden man. But he was enormously empathetic and, you know, deeply psychological when it came to talking about Twain.

[D]

He was so removed from you. You've already talked about how writing was his private space and you couldn't really separate the writer from the father. I think it's important for listeners to understand he worked from home from the beginning, but his study, as you describe it in your work, is a sort of inner sanctum, and it is painful. When you enter that inner sanctum, there are often repercussions.

[E]

The study. It's interesting that you mentioned the study because we grew up in this big house in Cambridge and you came in the front door and the study was right there to the right. You couldn't get into the house without passing the study, and the door was always shut. And the sort of irony here is that he was much more present in a certain way than many of the fathers that I knew who would leave the house at 8 and come back at 8. He cooked dinner at a time when men didn't do a lot of cooking. He played Frisbee with us in the street, but he wasn't really there in terms of emotionally. He was very there physically and activity wise. But as soon as it got sort of emotional, he would disappear and disappear into his study.

[D]

Do you think there's an entire generation of people out there Listening right now who are nodding about their own dads with what you just said.

[E]

And that's been really interesting with this book, because a lot of people have said to me, you know, this is how I felt about my father, that he was. He was sometimes there. He was not there, but that the emotional aspect or the sort of intimate connection with their father was. Was not there. And, you know, I hear people say, you know, this was what sort of men were told to do or trained to do as fathers in that era.

[D]

That strikes me, though, in reading the book, as oversimplifying.

[E]

Yeah, I agree completely.

[D]

But as you give us breadcrumbs throughout the book, because that's the only way we get to know your dad. Right. These chapters are a little bit of him, a little bit of Mark Twain, a little bit of you, a little of your mom, or memories. We start to piece together a childhood that had enough loss and maybe enough trauma in it that it's not entirely shocking. He might be public when it feels safe, but intensely private, where it would be intimate to let himself be known.

[E]

And I think I didn't understand until I'd finished this book, until it was months after this book, how much I felt that grief ran through his life. He had lost both his parents by the time that he was 13, and went to college when he was 15 or just 16, and was brought up by his older brother and an aunt and then a housekeeper who had been with him before his parents died. And he never, ever talked about his parents, ever, ever. But it was the thing, I think, that I was aware of from, you know, the earliest, earliest age.

[D]

And I want to underscore that when we say never, you found out by accident that you named your son after your own grandfather. You didn't even know.

[E]

I did not know. I did not know. And that's sort of shocking to me on two levels. One is that I didn't know because I'd never heard him mention the name Tobias. I didn't know that his father's name was Tobias because I'd never heard him talk about it. But secondly, when he heard, of course, that I was naming my child Tobias, he didn't say anything.

[D]

You said a minute ago that you learned that grief ran through his life. Did it run through yours?

[E]

I think it did. I think it did. I think that one of another thing that I sort of discovered about grief in this book is that I think that my desire to connect with him all my life had to do with sort of alleviating his grief, which I felt had somehow fallen to me, and that by the end of this book I feel that I had relieved myself of some of this. And he has this beautiful line. He said that biography is an antidote to loneliness and a restorative of solitude. And it took me a while. I had to read that a thousand times to understand. But I think that grief is a state, among other things, of great loneliness. And when you can write a biography, or when you can write a character, or when you can connect to somebody else, however you do makes you feel less alone. And then you can sit in your solitude, which is a productive, more peaceful place than grief.

[D]

Hester Kaplan's book is twice Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography. Hester, thank you.

[E]

Thank you very. Much.

[B]

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