"Wall Street Journal," "Favorite Books of the Year 2013""Cosmopolitan," "Best Books of the Year for Women""Library Journal," "Best Books of 2013""Salon," "Best Books of 2013" "Haunting...more than a beautifully written memoir. [A] powerful and raw love letter.""--The Washington Post"""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""

Christa Parravani is a writer and photographer. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally, and are represented by the Michael Foley Gallery in New York City and the Kopeikin gallery in Los Angeles. She has taught photography at Dartmouth College, Columbia University and UMass, Amherst. She earned her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers Newark. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Anthony Swofford ("Jarhead") and their daughter.