My sister, my love: The intimate story of Skyler Rampike - Joyce Carol Oates

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.

With My Sister, My Love, Joyce Carol Oates returns with a wry tale inspired by the true-crime mystery of the JonBenet Ramsey murder. Part investigation into the unsolved murder; part elegy for the lost Bliss and for Skyler's own lost childhood; part corrosively funny exposé of the pretensions of upper-middle class American suburbia, this captivating novel mines the depths of the sinister yet comic malaise at the heart of our contemporary culture, and emerges with a darkly amusing exploration of the tragic interface between private life and the perilous public existence of celebrity.