In Sister Zero, a woman who never wanted children suddenly becomes a
mother to her nine-year-old nephew after her sister commits suicide at
age 34. Fifteen years later, the boy will also kill himself and in
almost exactly the same manner.
Sister Zero is narrated through short prose sections and snippets of
"advice" from Mister Ed (of the old television show), while Nance Van
Winckel exhumes the sisters' shared childhood for missed clues,
interrogates memory's accuracy, and interacts with a mother who's
disappearing into late-stage Alzheimer's.
As the shock of these deaths ripples out, the book progresses in swift
strokes between the tough and tender, often staring stony-eyed at a
terrifying moment, then jumping forward or backward in time to a moment
of quiet humor.
Each chapter begins with an altered page from the Official Guide to the
1964 World's Fair: collages Van Winckel made as testaments to that
touchstone event in New York when the sisters were children, a time she
realized how huge the world was, how vastly different other countries
and cultures were from her own. The Fair was all about the future, its
bright and happy promises. She and her now-dead sister rode a ride
called "tunnel to the future." The sister was scared; our narrator was
not.
