Her: A Memoir
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2013: Brave, raw, and ultimately uplifting, Christa Parravani’s debut memoir unbraids the memory of her life from her identical twin, Cara, who died of an overdose at age 28. Cara had been the larger, hungrier twin since birth, but they both emerged from a chaotic childhood to become magnetic and creatively precocious. Cara claimed writing as her territory, so Christa took pictures. They married young but remained more devoted to each other than their spouses. Then in 2001, Cara was viciously raped while walking her dog in a park. She survived, but she was deeply damaged, physically and psychologically. Christa tried for years to restore her, and after Cara’s death, she felt as if she became her sister. She heard Cara’s voice as her own, saw Cara staring back at her from mirrors-in warning, and also as an invitation to tear apart her life “just as she’d shredded her own.” Such hallucinations are a common delusion among the newly twinless: “they become a breathing memorial for their lost half,” and half of them die within the first two years. Told in part in the voice of her lost sister,Heris the story of how Christa clawed her way back from this gulf of grief and gave herself permission to live.--Mari Malcolm