Parravani delicately probes the fragile, intimate boundaries among love, identity and loss.
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.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9653-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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