Memoirs and mysteries; using their hands

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Congratulations to the Providence writer Hester Kaplan and her husband, Michael D. Stein, M.D., for their new books.

 

Ms. Kaplan, a novelist and short-story writer, has just published Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography.  This memoir revolves around her attempts to better understand her father, Justin Kaplan, the famed biographer of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Lincoln Steffens, and the author of other books, too; he was also a distinguished editor.  I found it haunting and honest, leavened with what you might call  social comedy, such as life among the self-conscious and often quietly anxious literary and academic strivers in their Cambridge, Mass., neighborhood and on Cape Cod. 

Mr. Kaplan, well experienced in family tragedy as a boy, was a very complicated man, whose layers his daughter has striven with considerable success to peel off. I wonder how Mr. Kaplan, a memoirist himself, would have responded to his daughter’s book.

“I’m an obscurantist. I’m drawn to people whose lives have a certain mystery — mysteries that aren’t going to be solved, that are too sacred to be solved,’’ Mr. Kaplan told Newsweek in 1980. Hester Kaplan seems to have unraveled some mysteries about her father, but not all.

We often seem to have much more interest  in trying to understand why our parents did what they did after they’re dead.   I know I am still trying to figure out mine many years after their deaths. But as L.P. Hartley famously wrote for the  start of his novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there".  Of course, in probing their mysteries, we’re trying to better understand who we  are. To greater or lesser degrees, we are mysteries to ourselves.

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For his part, Dr. Stein, a primary-care physician,  health-policy researcher and prolific writer, has come out with A Living: Working-Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor. These are vignettes based on Dr. Stein’s conversations with his patients who, in a wide variety  of ways, do manual labor. Many of them have had tough lives and have been victims of the harsh side of American capitalism, and some have been victims of their behavioral mistakes.

(I’m so glad that Dr. Stein included a clam digger!)

Dr. Stein notes that A Living was inspired by Studs Terkel’s 1974 best-selling book Working.

A Living presents an often poignant, sometimes jarring and sometimes funny, or at least wry, look into a part of American life that more privileged citizens would do well to  know much more about, such as by reading this little book. Indeed, their ignorance about, and/or lack of interest in, these people explains some of our biggest economic, social and political problems.