My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike - Hardcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061547484 ISBN 13: 9780061547485

Publisher: Ecco, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

From the Back Cover

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.

Reviews

Adult/High School—Oates examines a family made famous first by the success, and then by the murder of their six-year-old ice-skating star, Bliss Rampike. Through 19-year-old Skyler, readers are introduced to the family. They know that his younger sister has been killed. But by whom, and why? The author holds back nothing in this portrait of a family gone horribly wrong: two egotistical, noncommunicative adults raising their firstborn, who cannot live up to their expectations or their own dreams, and their daughter, who tries. Readers see not only the relentless striving of the mother for fame and fortune, but also the manipulation of her son. Skyler tells of his memories (he was nine when his sister died) and of the present with appropriately excruciating detail—the overwhelming intrusion of the outside world, the public damning of his family, and the repercussions he suffers. The first-person narrative requires close attention to the web of lies and intrigue that the author spins. The use of footnotes by Skyler may confuse some teens, but the insights contained in them are invaluable. This is not a quick read, but rather a painful scrutiny of society and the things people often value. Give this book to advanced readers who will want to solve the mystery, and who want to study the dynamics of a dysfunctional family and/or of a society driven mad by media coverage. Intelligent and thought-provoking.—Janet Melikian, Central High School East, Fresno, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Starred Review. Oates revisits in fantastic fashion the JonBenet Ramsay murder, replacing the famous family with the Rampikes—father Bix, a bully and compulsive philanderer; mother Betsey, obsessed with making her daughter, Bliss, into a prize-winning figure skater; and son Skyler, the narrator of this tale of ambition, greed and tragedy. Skyler's voice—leaden with grief and guilt—is sometimes that of the nine-year-old he was when his sister was killed, and sometimes the teen he is now, 10 years later, when a letter from his dying mother solves the mystery of Bliss's death. The emotionally wrecked Rampike children are collateral damage in a vicious marital battle; Sky is shunted aside, while Bliss is ruthlessly manipulated. Stylistic tricks (direct-address footnotes chief among them) lighten Oates's razor-sharp satire of a privileged enclave where social-climbing neighbors dwell in gargantuan houses; as Oates's readers will expect, the novel is long, propelled at breakneck speed and apt to indulge in verbal excess (as in the 55-page novella within the novel). Oates's psychological acuity, however, ranks this novel as one of the best from a dark observer of our lives and times. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Of course Oates, fluent in the valor and vulnerability of girls in our aggressively sexualized world, would be drawn to the unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsey. But she is also imaginative and daring enough to fictionalize that horrendous case with ferocious intensity, nervy wit, and profound purpose. Bix Rampike, big, sexy, and ruthless, is intent on getting mega-rich. Anxious and needy Betsey Rampike longs to impress the elite in their snooty New Jersey town, and tries to use her jittery son, Skyler, as bait. But it’s her second child, high-strung Edna Louise, who fulfills Betsey’s dream via figure skating. Oates’ choice of girls’ exhibition ice-skating is inspired. It’s a cold, hard, and precarious realm fraught with prurience. And her choice of narrator is equally ingenious: Skyler tells the story of his sister’s grotesque and grueling transformation into Bliss, a provocatively costumed ice fairy, a decade after her death. He has barely survived his toxic family, and his chronicle of the Rampikes’ erotically charged self-destruction becomes a mordantly satirical indictment of a deeply neurotic society, replete with its “Tabloid Hell” and “cybercesspoolspace.” Damaged and incisive, Skyler is an utterly compelling narrator, and Oates is at once wrenchingly visceral and transcendently empathic in this bold and astute tragedy of fatal ambition. An unforgettable novel of extraordinary dimension and power. --Donna Seaman

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

My Sister, My Love

The Intimate Story of Skyler RampikeBy Joyce Carol Oates

Ecco

Copyright © 2008 Joyce Carol Oates
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-154748-5

Chapter One

"Survivor"

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 (if your misfortune is to be me, Skyler Rampike, that is), yet you break out in the proverbial cold sweat staring at the little girl on the ice, praying that she won't slip and fall on the ice ... But Bliss's score will be posted at 5.9 out of a possible 6.

And all this to the soft-rock disco beat of the 1980s, "Do What Feels Right."

(Any fellow/sister sufferers of R.C.S. among my readers? If so, you will sympathize with my helpless need to repeat, review, and revise certain episodes from my past/my sister's past ad nauseam.)

At the frenzied height of my family's fame/infamy in the approximate years 1997-1999, you could hardly avoid seeing heartrending photographs of the "prodigy" girl skater who'd been murdered in her own home in an affluent New Jersey community less than eighty miles west of the George Washington Bridge. You could hardly avoid seeing photographs of the little girl with her family, particularly the media favorite taken just before Christmas 1996 of the Rampikes seated before the ten-foot extravagantly decorated fir tree in the living room of their Fair Hills, New Jersey, "part restored" Colonial: broad shouldered good-looking Bruce "Bix" Rampike, who is Bliss's daddy; strikingly dressed, eagerly smiling Betsey Rampike, who is Bliss's mummy; little Bliss in a crimson velvet frock trimmed in white (ermine) fur, with the glittery Jersey Ice Princess tiara on her small head, white eyelet stockings and shiny black patent leather ballerina flats and that famous sweet shy angel smile, between Daddy and Mummy and each is clasping Bliss firmly in the crook of an arm; and, at the edge of the family portrait, in a vulnerable position to be handily cropped from the photo, the older, talentless brother Skyler.

By "older" I mean nine, in December 1996. Three years older than Bliss. And now, astonishingly, I am thirteen years older than Bliss was when she died. Skyler? what has happened to you? Skyler what terrible thing has happened to you.... too?

I don't think I will describe what I look like, just yet. An "invisible narrator" sounds like a good idea to me.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from My Sister, My Loveby Joyce Carol Oates Copyright © 2008 by Joyce Carol Oates. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061547484
• ISBN 13: 9780061547485
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576