Her: A Memoir (Parravani) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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’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.
Publishers Weekly


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.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) 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


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.
Kirkus Reviews