'In 2005, Chloe Higgins was seventeen years old. She and her mother, Rhonda, stayed home so that she could revise for her exams while her two younger sisters Carlie and Lisa went skiing with their father. On the way back from their trip, their car veered off the highway, flipped on its side and burst into flames. Both her sisters were killed. Their father walked away from the accident with only minor injuries.
'This book is about what happened next.
'In a memoir of breathtaking power, Chloe Higgins describes the heartbreaking aftermath of that one terrible day. It is a story of grieving, and learning to leave grief behind, for anyone who has ever loved, and lost.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Brittany Higgins has signed a book deal with Penguin Random House Australia. Not just any book — a memoir.'
'A stunning exploration of grief and love, memory and shame.'
'For two years, I kept track of how many days it had been since we’d last had sex. If it had been more than seven days, I told myself I had to put out. If it had been one or two, my body was my own. The first time I realised this was not normal was when I posted about it on Facebook.' (Introduction)
'The title of Chloe Higgins’ debut memoir is shorthand for her two younger sisters, victims of a fatal car accident when the author is aged seventeen. Her family avoids using their individual names, explains Higgins, so that ‘they are separate from us, an abstract thing on which we need not hang our pain’. In her frank depictions of drug use, sex work, mental illness, and her fraught relationship with her bereaved mother, Higgins might be described as unflinching in her approach. But the telling of this story is equally characterised by a flinching: from the memory of her sisters; from her own pain.' (Introduction)
'How do we talk about grief? Chloe Higgins’s memoir reveals her response to the loss of her sisters, and the impact of that loss on her parents. '
'Early in The Girls, Chloe Higgins recounts her father’s reaction when he learns his two other children were killed in the car accident that has put him in hospital. “It is almost cartoonish, the way his mouth spreads open and his eyes push together, his forehead scrunching in on itself … ” Higgins writes of Maurice, who was driving the family car when it swerved into oncoming traffic and burst into flames, daughters Carlie and Lisa still trapped inside.' (Introduction)
'How do we talk about grief? Chloe Higgins’s memoir reveals her response to the loss of her sisters, and the impact of that loss on her parents. '
'The title of Chloe Higgins’ debut memoir is shorthand for her two younger sisters, victims of a fatal car accident when the author is aged seventeen. Her family avoids using their individual names, explains Higgins, so that ‘they are separate from us, an abstract thing on which we need not hang our pain’. In her frank depictions of drug use, sex work, mental illness, and her fraught relationship with her bereaved mother, Higgins might be described as unflinching in her approach. But the telling of this story is equally characterised by a flinching: from the memory of her sisters; from her own pain.' (Introduction)
'Brittany Higgins has signed a book deal with Penguin Random House Australia. Not just any book — a memoir.'
'A stunning exploration of grief and love, memory and shame.'
'For two years, I kept track of how many days it had been since we’d last had sex. If it had been more than seven days, I told myself I had to put out. If it had been one or two, my body was my own. The first time I realised this was not normal was when I posted about it on Facebook.' (Introduction)
