Wellfleet Public Library

In Conversation with Jean Hey

Twice Born opens with the death of Hester's father, biographer Justin Kaplan. Despite his relatively prolitic output, Justin rarely wrote, or said, much about himself-even to his daughter. Standing at his open casket, Hester has the realization that while alive, her father never looked her in the eyes. Hester takes on the challenge of piecing together as intimate a biography of her own father as possible, comparing his story to the lives of his biographical subjects and dissecting the various personas he presents to the world-from which the name "dad," "daddy," or even "father" is conspicuously and painfully absent. Parallel to Justin's story runs Hester's own journey of development as a writer and a thinker, which begins in the shadow of not only her talented father, but also her novelist mother, and the fiercely protective union the two of them had built, often to the exclusion of their own children. In sensitive, intimate writing, Kaplan paints a rich picture of the twentieth century literary world that she grew up in, all while reflecting on the deceptive nature of memory, the loneliness of creative pursuits, and the dovetailing paradoxes of biographical and autobiographical writing.

Hester Kaplan is the author of novels and story collections including The Edge of Marriage, winner of the Flannery Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories series.

She is the recipient of two NEA awards, and was named a Mark Twain Fellow for Twice Born. Jean Hey's work has been published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Plain Dealer, the Chicago Tribune, Solstice Literary Magazine, The MacGuttin, Arrowsmith Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Born and educated in South Africa, Jean worked as a journalist on two major newspapers in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and as a correspondent for The Times of London, reporting on Black education.