Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography

In this affecting memoir, Kaplan (Unravished) examines her relationship with her father, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Justin Kaplan, who died in 2014. When Kaplan was growing up, her father was private and habitually distant, rarely looking her in the eyes. She posits that they never “found comfortable or honest footing together because we were too alike: shy, cripplingly private, overly vulnerable, hoarders of our true selves.” Still, after Justin’s death from Parkinson’s, Kaplan felt compelled to “feel what it felt to be him.” She began by reading Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, the book that earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, for the first time. From there, she tried to piece together her own imperfect biography of her father, sifting through documents and letters that illuminated his closeness as a child with the family’s housekeeper and reflecting on his relationship with Kaplan’s mother, the writer Anne Bernays, who felt stifled in her own creative life by sexism and her husband’s considerable shadow. Kaplan finds few smoking guns, but her project honors her father’s stated goal of examining “the tensions between the familiar, shared life of human beings.” Melancholy and meticulously written, this excavation of a literary lineage isn’t easy to forget. Agent: Jennifer Carlson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Oct.)