Over the past few years, a surprising new genre has emerged: the critic’s daughter’s memoir. In 2022, there was Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me. The alluded-to-father there was the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who died four months after Calhoun’s account of him as a good poet, a great critic, and a “reckless, mercurial, occasionally mean father” was published. In 2023, there was Priscilla Gilman’s The Critic’s Daughter, a more straightforwardly affectionate, though still not entirely unambivalent, memoir about Richard Gilman: the superb drama critic for, among other places, The Nation and Commonweal. Now we have Hester Kaplan’s Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography (Catapult, $27, 256 pp.), the most formally and emotionally complicated of the bunch. The father she hopes to find is the late Justin Kaplan, whose 1966 Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and is, in narrative verve and critical intelligence, one of the best literary biographies of the twentieth century. (A later biography, Walt Whitman: A Life [1980], also won the National Book Award.)