Heidi Julavits is entranced by Christa Parravani’s memoir, her, about the death of her identical twin Cara:
Briefly their story is this. Until Cara died, she and Christa functioned as a single entity split between two bodies. As children, the twins vowed that if one perished the other would commit suicide. “The unharmed twin would take her life by whatever means she possessed: Drano, phone cord, knife, swan dive from a cliff.” (Parravani cites the following statistic: 50 percent of “identicals” die within two years of the death of their twin.) …
Cara matured into a drug abuser and the less stable of the two; Christa, by comparison, was driven and even-keeled. Then, at the age of twenty-four, Cara was raped and nearly killed while walking her dog in the woods.
What had been transpiring gradually—the twins’ healthy separation into two adult women—was violently hastened. “The moment my sister fell under her rapist’s hand, he untwinned us: the bodies were the same but Cara became lost in hers. My body became a vessel of guilt, reminded us both of the past . . . joyful giving of sex, ripe exposed youth, and the naïve belly that still tickles at touch.” The trauma precipitated a drug-addiction tailspin from which Cara never recovered. The twins’ relationship became untenable. “She hates you for reminding her of what she was,” the author writes. “You fear her for showing you what you could become.” Christa, after trying repeatedly to help Cara get clean, adopted the tough-love approach. Cara’s final angry words to her gauntlet-throwing sister were, more or less, if I die now it will be on you.
And then, as Charlotte Brontë might have it, Cara died. (As Charlotte Brontë would not have it, she died of a heroin overdose, in a bathroom.) But contrary to sisterly suicide pacts and the rules of metaphysics, both sisters, in a sense, lived on. “While she was alive I was vibrant, responsible, steady, and holding her up,” writes Parravani. “I was her opposite. In the wake of Cara’s death, I became her.”
(Photo: “Blizzard” by Christa Parravani, from the series Kindred)
The Dish 