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 morg ue 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. If you’ve followed the Bliss Rampike case, most likely you’ve only glimpsed Skyler in passing. As for me, Skyler? Anonymous and forgettable as a soap bubble. Irony is, this celebrity, which the parents of virtually every six-yearold in the country would die for, came to my sister only posthumously. 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. January 29, 1997, in our home in Fair Hills, New Jersey.
#MY ELEVEN YEAR OLD SON NIFTY GAY INCEST FREE#
(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, g uilt-ridden, appropriate to the “survivor” who abandoned his six-year-old sister to her “fate” sometime in the “wee hours” of W hich 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. Somewhere in New Jersey, years ago, has to be at least a decade. Rampike? That family? The little girl skater, the one who was.
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. My last name-“Rampike”-has caused your eyelids to flutter, right? Ram-pike. A name, my father Bix Rampike believed, to set its bearer apart from the merely commonplace. A name specifically chosen by my father, who’d expected great things from me, as his firstborn child, and male. It is a catchy name isn’t it? Skyler: sky. Me, I’m the “surviving” child of an infamous American family but probably after almost ten years you won’t remember me: Skyler. This child-voice in my head.ĭY S F U N C T I O N A L FA M I L I E S A R E A L L A L I K E. So afraid I hurt so Skyler you won’t leave me in this terrible place will you Skyler? Nine years, ten months, five days. S KY L E R I A M S O L O N E LY I N T H I S P L A C E S KY L E R I A M Nor is its depiction of “Tabloid Hell” intended to be a literal depiction of media response to the crime. This includes all characters in the Rampike family, their legal counsel, and their friends. Though My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike has its genesis in a notorious American “true crime mystery” of the late twentieth centur y, it is a work of the imagination solely and lays no claim to representing actual persons, places, or historical events.
PY MĪBOUT THE AUTHOR OTHER BOOKS BY JOYCE CAROL OATES CREDITS COVER COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHERĪU T H O R’ S N O T E / D I S C L A I M E R The death of a beautiful girl-child of no more than ten years of age is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. The Sickness unto Death (translated by Howard V. Despair is a sickness of the spirit, of the self, and accordingly can take three forms: in despair not to be conscious of having a self in despair not to will to be oneself in despair to will to be oneself.