See What I Have Done

Starred review from May 8, 2017
Schmidt’s unforgettable debut brings a legendary American crime to eerie new life. Four narrators recount events surrounding the 1892 murders of Andrew and Abby Borden: Lizzie Borden; her older sister, Emma; and the family’s maid, Bridget Sullivan, are within the Massachusetts home in which the deaths occurred. The fourth, a young man known only as Benjamin, is a stranger to everyone in the family but the sisters’ maternal uncle, who is visiting at the time of the tragedy. Though their interpretations of events differ, all describe roiling tensions. The manipulative, nearly feral Lizzie is forever scarred by her mother’s early death, while Emma longs for an artistic life uncomplicated by her sister’s outsized presence. Their relationship with their father and stepmother is fractured: Andrew Borden is a miserly, abusive man who thinks nothing of beheading the pet pigeons Lizzie loves, and his second wife, Abby, has never gained her stepdaughters’ trust. On August 4, family conflicts erupt in a chain of events that is as intricate as it is violent. Equally compelling as a whodunit, “whydunit,” and historical novel, the book honors known facts yet fearlessly claims its own striking vision. Even before the murders, the Bordens’ cruel, claustrophobic lives are not easy to visit, but from them Schmidt has crafted a profoundly vivid and convincing fictional world. Agent: Dan Lazar, Writers House.

February 28, 2017
Like Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites and Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s The Love of a Bad Man, See What I Have Done is based on true crimes committed by women. In 1892, 32-year-old Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted of the brutal axe murder of her father Andrew Borden and her stepmother Abby. They were murdered in their home in the Massachusetts town of Fall River. Through the voices of the protagonists, Sarah Schmidt constructs a gruesome and disturbing portrait of a pathologically dysfunctional household. There is the cruel and authoritarian father who plays his children off against each other; the ineffectual, neurotic stepmother; the unbalanced, delusional younger daughter; her sister, who is trying to escape; the exploited Irish maid; and a weird, manipulating uncle and his even weirder sidekick. Mix all these together and add the mysterious killings and you get a grand gothic novel reminiscent of its antecedents in American culture such as A Streetcar Named Desire and Who Killed Baby Jane. That it’s done so well and so compellingly by an author from suburban Melbourne makes it all the more surprising. I found it disturbingly confronting—watch out for the mutton broth and the vomit—but couldn’t stop reading it! Mark Rubbo is the managing director of Readings