Read more
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.
About the author
Nance Van Winckel has published nine poetry collections, including a book of visual poems, Book of No Ledge. Of her five books of fiction, Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook, is the most recent. The recipient of two NEA fellowships, the Washington State Book Award, a Paterson Fiction Prize, Poetry Society of America's Gordon Barber Award, a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes, Nance teaches in Vermont College's MFA Program and lives in Spokane.
