Christa Parravani, on Her Reckoning with Life, Death and Choice.

Dec 16, 2020

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with Christa Parravani @cparravani about her harrowing account, Loved and Wanted, the story of one woman's reckoning with life, death and "choice". It is, she says, a memoir of 'Choice, Children and Womanhood.'

In 2017 Christa Parravani had recently moved her family from California to West Virginia and was surviving on a teacher's salary and raising two young children with her husband, screenwriter Anthony Swofford.

Another pregnancy, a year after giving birth to her second child, came as a shock. Christa had a history of ectopic pregnancies, and worried that she wouldn't be able to find adequate medical care. She immediately requested a termination, but her doctor refused to help. The only doctor who would perform an abortion made it clear that this would be illicit, not condoned by her colleagues or their community.

Christa Parravani has crafted, through her own harrowing experiences with healthcare in contemporary America, a brilliant and moving exploration of the choices women have.

Christa Parravani is the author of the Indie bestselling Her: A Memoir, which shares Parravani's journey through grief after the loss of her identical twin sister Cara. Her was named the Amazon Debut Spotlight Pick for March 2013, an Amazon best book of the month, and an NPR critics pick. Vanity Fair calls Her "astonishing." Her was an Indie Bound Next Pick, a 2013 Books for a Better Life nominee, and both an Oprah and People Magazine must-read memoir. In a starred review, Booklist calls Her "raw and unstoppable... a triumph of the human spirit." In Bookforum, Heidi Julavits says “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.”

 

Review - 'Haunting, wild, and quiet at once. A shimmering look at motherhood, in all gothic pain and glory. I could not stop reading' - Lisa Taddeo, bestselling author of Three Women