“Parranvani’s self-assured, unflinching writing belies her status as novice author. She writes candidly about life before and after her twin’s death.”
      —BookPage

“Parravani’s prose paints her phoenix-like transformation such that the reader feels the flames of her life. . . . Raw and unstoppable, Her illuminates the triumph of the human spirit—both individual and shared.”
      —Booklist [HC starred review]

“Raw, feverish, and often harshly beautiful.”
      —Entertainment Weekly

“A finely wrought achievement of grace, emotional honesty, and self-possession.”
      —Publishers Weekly

“Parravani delicately probes the fragile, intimate boundaries among love, identity and loss.”
      —Kirkus Reviews

“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 . . .  Christa Parravani carries us with her into the excavation of what it means to be a survivor, 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

 “Christa Parravani writes with extraordinary emotional honesty. . . . 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

“Her ranks with the best American memoirs of the decade. . . . 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

“Deeply thoughtful, lyrical, even magical. . . . 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

“I couldn’t stop . . . wondering what it would be like to be as close to another person as these sisters were to each other. An intense . . . journey, an inspiring book.”
       —Julie Metz, author of The New York Times bestseller Perfection

“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 was born in Albany, New York and grew up on the Marine Corps base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband Anthony Swofford and their young daughter Josephine. Christa is an MFA graduate of Rutgers Newark. Christa is also an internationally exhibited photographer and two-time MacDowell fellow. She has taught at UMass Amherst, Dartmouth College and SUNY Purchase. She is represented by Foley Gallery in NYC and Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles.