Jeff Buckley spent his life trying to escape the shadow of his estranged father, folk musician Tim Buckley. Yet after both died young, Tim of an overdose in 1975, Jeff in a tragic river accident in 1997, their stories became inseparable. Rolling Stone editor David Browne, author of Dream Brother and Jeff Buckley: His Own Voice, joins Erin and Elizabeth to discuss the Buckley legacy and why Grace still haunts new listeners three decades later.

It’s not quite accurate to say that Hester Kaplan’s father Justin Kaplan was a man of few words because Justin Kaplan was a man of many. His first book, a biography of Mark Twain published in 1966, won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, a debut that ensured Kaplan would enjoy a long and prestigious career as an author and editor. It was an idyllic life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that he shared with his wife Anne Bernays, also a novelist, and their three daughters.

But Hester doesn’t remember her father ever looking her in the eyes or letting any of his three kids call him ‘Dad,’ not out of any cruelty or neglect, but more of a mysterious inability to go there. Hester remembers the steady clickety clack of his typing behind the study door as a child as he wrote, his quiet retreat in a household filled with estrogen, and craved the connection over his own memories of growing up that were never revealed.

Even after Hester became an author herself, she had never read any of her father’s work - nor had he read hers. But after his death in 2014, Hester embarked on a new book, TWICE BORN: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography (available now), wherein she biographs the biographer, unearthing not only the parallels between Joe/Justin’s interior life and those of the literary giants he memorialized, but also finds intimacy in her memories of a surprisingly tender man who eschewed sentimentality but nevertheless always had a chestnut for the people he loved. Here’s more of my conversation with Hester Kaplan.

In the Task finale, "A Still, Small Voice," TMAYF gets into three Fs that have always been at the core of the series: faith, forgiveness, and fatherhood. (Also, feathers, but this is our least bird-centric recap to date.) We also discuss Mark Ruffalo’s Phillies-cup redemption arc, say goodbye to DelCo’s saddest dads and the yawning expanses between their actions and self-awareness, and talk about the miracle of grace, even when it’s hard to find.