New York Times bestselling author of The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates returns with a dark, wry, satirical tale—inspired by an unsolved American true-crime mystery.
"Dysfunctional families are all alike. Ditto 'survivors.'"
So begins the unexpurgated first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an "infamous" American family. A decade ago the Rampikes were destroyed by the murder of Skyler's six-year-old ice-skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed. Part investigation into the unsolved murder; part elegy for the lost Bliss and for Skyler's own lost childhood; and part corrosively funny exposé of the pretensions of upper-middle-class American suburbia, this captivating novel explores with unexpected sympathy and subtlety the intimate lives of those who dwell in Tabloid Hell.
Likely to be Joyce Carol Oates's most controversial novel to date, as well as her most boldly satirical, this unconventional work of fiction is sure to be recognized as a classic exploration of the tragic interface between private life and the perilous life of "celebrity." In My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, the incomparable Oates once again mines the depths of the sinister yet comic malaise at the heart of our contemporary culture.
Dysfunctional families are all alike. Ditto "survivors."
Me, I'm the "surviving" child of an infamous American family but probably after almost ten years you won't remember me: Skyler.
It is a catchy name isn't it? Skyler: sky.
A name specifically chosen by my father, who'd expected great things from me, as his firstborn child, and male.
A name, my father Bix Rampike believed, to set its bearer apart from the merely commonplace.
My last name—"Rampike"—has caused your eyelids to flutter, right? Ram-pike. Of which, unless you're willfully obtuse, or pretending to be "above it all" (i.e., the ravaged earth of tabloid America), or mentally impaired, or really young, you've certainly heard.
Rampike? That family? The little girl skater, the one who was...
And whoever did it, never...
The parents, or a sex maniac, or...
Somewhere in New Jersey, years ago, has to be at least a decade...
Which is why—at last!—I've made myself begin whatever this will be, some kind of personal document—a "unique personal document"—not a mere memoir but (maybe) a confession. (Since in some quarters Skyler Rampike is a murder suspect you'd think that I have plenty to confess, wouldn't you?) Fittingly, this document will not be chronological/linear but will follow a pathway of free association organized by an unswerving (if undetectable) interior logic: unliterary, unpretentious, disarmingly crude-amateur, guilt-ridden, appropriate to the "survivor" who abandoned his six-year-old sister to her "fate" sometime in the "wee hours" of January 29, 1997, in our home in Fair Hills, New Jersey. Yes I am that Rampike.
The older brother of the most famous six-year-old in the history of the United States if not all of North America if not all of the world for consider: how many six-year-olds you've ever heard of, girl or boy, American or otherwise, have such name and face "recognition" as Bliss Rampike; how many have more than 500,000 citations on the Internet; and how many are immortalized by more than three hundred Web sites/home pages/blogs maintained by loyal/crazed cultists? These are facts.
Irony is, this celebrity, which the parents of virtually every six-year-old in the country would die for, came to my sister only posthumously.
As for me, Skyler? Anonymous and forgettable as a soap bubble. O.K.: a weird-looking soap bubble. If you've followed the Bliss Rampike case, most likely you've only glimpsed Skyler in passing. The brother has been ignored in your haste to ogle, with prim disapproving frowns, the prurient documents posted on the Internet, pirated Rampike family photos, illicitly acquired crime-scene photos and morgue photos and autopsy reports in addition to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of video footage of Bliss Rampike at the peak of her brief but dazzling career as the "youngest ever" Little Miss Jersey Ice Princess 1996, skating to triumph on the cold glittering ice rink of the Newark War Memorial Center. How "like an angel" in a strawberry colored satin and sequin skating costume with a perky tulle skirt and white lace panties peeking out from beneath and tiny sparks—"stardust"—in the beautiful little girl's ringleted blond hair as in her widened moist eyes, you feel your heart clench watching her, the small child alone on the ice, a chill lunar landscape glittering beneath her flashing skate blades, ah! there's a leap that brings a collective gasp from the audience, there's a spin on two skates, and now a spin on a single skate, these are tricky maneuvers even for older, champion skaters, these are precisely timed maneuvers in which the slightest hesitation or faltering or wincing with pain would be disastrous, and though you have seen this footage numberless times...
