Her: A Memoir

Publishers Weekly

A photographer and identical twin tells the intimately delineated, raw story of her beloved sister’s overdose on heroin and untimely death at age 28 in 2006. Emotionally attuned and protectively close to each other since growing up in Schenectady to parents in a rocky marriage before their strong-willed mother essentially raised them on her own, Parravani and her sister, Cara, were obsessed with the other for much of their lives: critical of their shared but subtly different looks; jealous of the other’s boyfriends, then husbands; and certain that the twins would die somehow together. In her mid-20s Cara was violently raped in the woods near her Holyoke, Mass., home, and spiraled into drug abuse (e.g., prescription drugs, heroin) from what was eventually diagnosed as “post-traumatic stress disorder with borderline features.” Her self-destruction imposed an enormous toll on the author, who felt responsible for her sister and riddled by guilt: “I feel like her life is in my hands,” Parravani said to her then-husband. In between Cara’s stays in rehab and mental hospitals, the author took numerous photographs of her sister and herself together as part of her growing artistic and teaching oeuvre, and in acutely observed passages (also alternating with Cara’s diary entries), the author describes her eerie attempts to create for the camera identical likenesses. Cara’s death sent the author into her own drug-induced death wish, before she pulled back from the brink; her memoir is a finely wrought achievement of grace, emotional honesty, and self-possession. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

"Her instantly became my reading obsession. . . . Parravani tackles her potentially melodramatic material with forthrightness and a flair for the darkly comic, while also remaining witchily true to the romantic uncanniness of twinhood. The tone she strikes is brashly ghoulish and heart twanging, the route through her past artfully circuitous. Her invites obsessional reader behavior because Parravani has the ability to make life, even at its worst, feel magic-tinged and vital and lived all the way down to the bone. She spins out of her dire experiences an enthralling story laced with weird luck and coincidences. . . . The final sentence, honest to god, made me cry." – Heidi Julavits, Bookforum

"Parravani succeeds in 'writing Cara back to life' and saving her own life in the process. No punches are pulled here, and Parravani’s matter-of-fact tone does nothing to shield readers from the enormity of her loss . . . . Imagine looking in a mirror and not seeing yourself. Imagine living the rest of your life with half of yourself missing. Imagine looking at your own corpse. You don’t have to imagine: Parravani’s story makes it all clear." – Library Journal (Starred)

"Concise and captivating, Parravani’s prose paints her phoenix-like transformation  such that the reader feels the flames of her fire. A poignant, book-arcing metaphor illustrates Christa’s battle to accept herself with a mirror-image. Raw and unstoppable, Her illuminates the triumph of the human spirit – both individual and shared." – Booklist (Starred)

"Christa Parravani powerfully transforms her anguish over the traumatic death of her troubled identical sister into the astonishing Her." – Vanity Fair

“A photographer and identical twin tells the intimately delineated, raw story of her beloved sister. . . a finely wrought achievement of grace, emotional honesty, and self-possession” – Publishers Weekly

"Christa Parravani's new memoir, Her, is a glimpse into the most intimate chambers of the identical twin relationship. . . Her is a tribute to the truly beloved, as well as a celebration of the push-and-pull between sisters."—The Oregonian

"Moving… just the right balance of joyous, melancholic and bitter. [We sometimes read memoir hoping] for a small glimpse into the inside of someone else’s reality in all its messy glory. With humility and an unbreakable love and respect for her other half, Christa Parravani allows us that in droves."—20somethingreads.com

"Full of headlong energy, Christa Parravani’s HER is reckless yet delicate, familiar yet otherworldly, precise yet with the soul of a fairytale, and deeply moving in surprising ways."
--Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking is the Bomb

“The best memoirs should come with a warning label, the kind that makes you take a deep breath before you open the cover. Her announces its challenges immediately while also establishing the voice that will pull you through the darkness of loss, memory and expiation. Suddenly bereft, twinless, distrusting the talent that has been her mainstay and questioning what it means to be a survivor, Christa Parravani carries us with her into the excavation of what it means to keep living, a lost twin and a woman digging herself out of her sister’s loss. That she comes out the other side is never predictable—merely miraculous.”
—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

“Out of a maelstrom of love, loss, and grief comes this beautiful clear-eyed memoir, one that reveals the power and peril of twinhood even as it explores ideas that affect us all: Why are we drawn to what may destroy us?  What makes us hurt the ones we love? And when we experience tragedy, how do we keep grief from eating us alive?  With a photographer’s sharp eye and a gifted writer’s penetrating insight, Parravani writes about being torn apart and then about piecing her life back together, brilliantly illuminating along the way what it means to be a sister, a daughter, a wife, an artist, and—ultimately, and triumphantly—herself.”
--Julie Orringer, author of The Invisible Bridge

“Christa Parravani's exploration of her relationship to her troubled identical twin sister is deeply thoughtful, lyrical, even magical. As she struggles for identity amid her sister's suffering, Parravani's own strength and talents emerge. There is rarely much redemption in losing the people we love, but Parravani transforms her pain into true beauty on the page.
-- Kerry Cohen, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

“In this powerful memoir about the death of her identical twin and its impact on her own life, Christa Parravani explores what it means to be a woman of creative spirit as few writers have. I couldn’t stop looking at the photograph on the cover, wondering what it would be like to be as close to another person as these sisters were to each other. An intense reading journey, an inspiring book.”
—Julie Metz, author of The New York Times bestselling Perfection

"Christa Parravani's lyrical, no-nonsense Her ranks with the best American memoirs of the decade. This incandescent story of loving and losing one's twin is an uncompromising love poem to the joys and dangers of shared identity, and an unforgettable treatise on addiction, trauma, survival, and triumph."
--Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Lark and Termite and Machine Dreams

"Christa Parravani writes with extraordinary emotional honesty about being a twin and losing that beloved other self, and with equally remarkable candor about being an artist and about marriage, grief and much more. I have never read a book that so directly engaged the perils and exaltations of being a female. The scenes between the sisters in this book are breathtaking. And Christa's difficulty looking in the mirror after the death of her identical twin becomes the reader's desire to see him or herself, and the world, more sensitively. A fine and rare book."
--Alice Elliott Dark, author of  In the Gloaming and Think of England

"The courage it must have taken Christa Parravani to write the memoir Her took my breath away. Not only did she confront, headfirst and with clear eyes, the story of her identical twin’s brutal rape and subsequent death spiral, but she had to, in essence, swallow her twin in order to summon the exquisite writer lying dormant within herself. The result is both a gripping tale of horror and redemption and a brilliant study of dichotomies, as only an identical twin adept at toggling between brain hemispheres could convey: dark versus light, Thanatos versus Eros, good versus evil, love versus hate, and every shade of gray, red, and crazy in between. I unreservedly loved this book."
--Deborah Copaken Kogan, author of Shutterbabe and The Red Book

Library Journal

There's great in-house excitement about this memoir by photographer Parravani, writing about what it's been like to have lived with and lost twin sister Cara, a talented writer sucked into a downward spiral of drugs and depression that led to an early death. Raised by a tough-minded single mother, the sisters were stung early by their father's rejection; Cara was also raped as a young adult, which magnified her pain. Christa reflects on their close bond and the struggle to survive without Cara. With a reading group guide and intensive promotion.

Kirkus Reviews

In this haunting memoir, photographer Parravani deconstructs the intense bonds between identical twins, the trauma of her sister's death and her battle against similar self-destruction. Raised by a strong-willed mother, the twins, Christa and Cara, shared a magical, intense and creative world of their own making. Plagued by unstable and abusive father figures and poverty, they still managed to attend prestigious colleges, begin careers as artists and embark on marriages. But following a rape while out walking her dog, Parravani's twin began a terrifying descent into drugs and self-destruction. A year after the rape, the author began to understand that her sister's situation was serious enough to require a stay at an expensive rehab center. "I was under the impression, the diluted perspective of the desperate," she writes, "that the more money we threw at the problem of Cara's addiction and despair, the more likely it was that she'd recover." Faced with the statistic that when one identical twin perishes, the surviving twin's rate of dying within the next few years spikes, the author chronicles her battle to avoid her sister's fate. Parravani's marriage failed, and as her career as a photography professor at a small college faltered, she checked herself into a personality-disorder wing of a hospital. Delicately weaving lyrical language together with her sister's journals, her mother's correspondence and conversations with family members, Parravani's mesmerizing narrative tapestry reveals the multiple facets inherent within their tangled, complex and loving relationship. "My reflection was her and it wasn't her. I was myself but I was my sister. I was hallucinating Cara--this isn't a metaphor," writes the author, who stepped back from the brink and began life anew with her second husband, the writer Anthony Swofford. Parravani delicately probes the fragile, intimate boundaries among love, identity and loss.