Contemporary Authors

• See What I Have Done ( novel) Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2017

1. See what I have done LCCN 2017003331 Type of material Book Personal name Schmidt, Sarah, 1979 September 10- author. Main title See what I have done / Sarah Schmidt. Edition First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017. Description 328 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780802126597 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PR9619.4.S34 S44 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

Print Marked Items
Schmidt, Sarah: SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Schmidt, Sarah SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE Atlantic Monthly (Adult Fiction) $25.00 8, 1 ISBN: 978-0-
8021-2659-7
A fictional reimagining of real-life murders so infamous they earned its alleged perpetrator her own
playground rhyme and ax-wielders everywhere a catchy chopping song, even if the killer's guilt was never
firmly established.On Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, Andrew Borden and his second wife,
Abby, were found butchered in their home, the weapon thought to be an ax, though police never found it. In
a dazzling debut novel that is as unsettling as the summer heat that permeates the crime scene, Schmidt
alternates the first-person narration among sisters Lizzie and Emma Borden; Bridget, the family's maid; and
a mysterious man named Benjamin, whose role doesn't come into focus so much as congeal like drying
blood. Tempestuous Lizzie still lives at home with her father and stepmother, whom she calls "Mrs.
Borden"; their relationship is strained at best. Older sister Emma, much to Lizzie's dismay, has left Fall
River to stay with a friend for a while; the symbiotic relationship between the sisters and their teetering
feelings of intense love and loathing fuel much of the novel's emotional fire. Bridget, who sees everything
and is seething that Mrs. Borden recently confiscated her savings, is eager to get out of the house--and
Schmidt creates such a palpable sense of unease that the reader is, too. Benjamin, a passing acquaintance of
the girls' uncle, burns with rage; Schmidt is careful not to lay blame for the murders directly at his feet,
though his presence is vital. It's a gamble to focus almost entirely on the day leading up to the murders and
the actual day of the crime rather than widening the scope to include Lizzie's well-known trial and eventual
acquittal, but it's one that pays off for Schmidt, creating an unusually intimate portrait. There are books
about murder and there are books about imploding families; this is the rare novel that seamlessly weaves the
two together, asking as many questions as it answers.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Schmidt, Sarah: SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329204/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0ab076e1.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329204
See What I Have Done
Publishers Weekly.
264.19 (May 8, 2017): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* See What I Have Done
Sarah Schmidt. Atlantic, $25 (336p) ISBN 9780-8021-2659-7
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. (Aug.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"See What I Have Done." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 33. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949046/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0a416965.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491949046
See What I Have Done
Jen Baker
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p29.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
* See What I Have Done. By Sarah Schmidt. Aug. 2017.328p. Atlantic Monthly, $25197808021891341.
The elegant and evocative writing style, combined with a mesmerizing, subtly menacing thrum of
psychological suspense, heralds the arrival of a major new talent. In Australian author Schmidt's debut
novel, four people alternate first-person narration, sharing their perspectives on events surrounding the
brutal ax murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1892. The
voices of Lizzie; her sister, Emma; and their maid, Bridget, along with that of mysterious stranger
Benjamin, reveal a family that's gone at least two steps beyond dysfunctional and into menacing, silent
dislike made worse by abusively controlling parents. Schmidt teases out not only the deep hatred harbored
by the characters, but also their individual reasons for (potentially) assaulting the Borden couple. An
inventive and perceptive presentation of clues shows how such violence could be perpetrated and never
resolved. Although it was assumed that Lizzie Borden killed her parents with a hatchet and destroyed the
evidence, it's clear from this fictional version of the case that she may not have been the only viable suspect.
Nail-biting horror mixes with a quiet, unforgettable power to create a novel readers will stay up all night
finishing. Those looking for a similar nail-biter might enjoy Christobel Kent's The Crooked House (2016)
and John Harwood's The Asylum (2013), both disturbing and psychologically dark.--Jen Baker
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Baker, Jen. "See What I Have Done." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 29. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495034933/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=39a3d698.
Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495034933

Leiding, Reba
Library Journal. 5/1/2017, Vol. 142 Issue 8, p68-68. 1/5p.
Book Review
Schmidt, Sarah. See What I Have Done. Atlantic. Aug. 2017. 324p. ISBN 9780802126597. $25; ebk. ISBN 9780802189134. F
DEBUT In this novel from Australian newcomer Schmidt, we are taken inside the delusional mind of accused 19th-century ax murderer Lizzie Borden and also witness the churning interior monologs of her older sister, Emma, and the Bordens’ hapless Irish maid, Bridget. We get to inhabit another character as well: a potential hit man named Benjamin, lured in by the sisters’ nefarious Uncle John. Schmidt employs some unusual word choices—animals “critter” instead of walk, lamplight “rages.” Not surprisingly, the prose is rife with a creepy physicality, its imagery dwelling on skin, blood, fingernails, smells, etc., although readers are spared much of the actual crime’s gruesomeness. The heated narrative contributes to the sense of simmering craziness permeating the Borden household. A historical time line of actual events is appended. What better subject for a psychological thriller than one of the most notorious murders in U.S. history, and the mysterious Benjamin adds color and suspense to what might otherwise be a well-worn tale. VERDICT A fresh treatment of Lizzie Borden, highly recommended for mystery and true crime fans and others who like smart, edgy works.

Greenblatt, Leah ()
Entertainment Weekly. 8/11/2017, Issue 1477, p60-61. 2p. 3 Color Photographs.
Book Review
SEE What I Have Done (Book)
SCHMIDT, Sarah
BORDEN, Lizzie, 1860-1927
NONFICTION
Reviews: Books
It's been 125 years since Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother were hacked to death. Why we, and the author of a sensual new novel, can't let it go
WHETHER LIZZIE BORDEN EVER really took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks, then turned and gave her father 41, we'll never know for sure; there was no CSI in 1892, and she was acquitted—in 90 minutes, no less—by a jury of her peers. So why do we still care so much? More than a century on, the legend of a mad blade-wielding spinster persists. Like so many others (see sidebar), Sarah Schmidt, the author of the richly imagined new novel See What I Have Done, became captivated by the crime long before she turned it into art. A librarian in Australia who worked on fiction in her spare time, she claims she was visited by Lizzie night after night in a recurring dream. Disturbed and intrigued, Schmidt steeped herself in Borden lore; she read trial transcripts and even flew 10,000 miles from her home in Melbourne to sleep in the house in Fall River, Mass., where her muse spent half her life and purportedly, one hot August morning, lost her mind.
See is the product of 11 years of that obsession, and it's a prickly, unsettling wonder: a story so tactile and feverishly surreal it feels like a sort of reverse haunting. Of the book's four narrators, three are pulled straight from history: Lizzie, her sister Emma, and the Borden's live-in help, Bridget. The fourth, a violent drifter named Benjamin whose fate will collide with theirs in mostly unseen ways, is Schmidt's own creation. Thirty-two-year-old Lizzie takes the lead, though she's hardly an ordinary heroine: A virginal, high-strung woman-child, she is alternately indulged and oppressed, fussing over her pet pigeons and shoving gritty spoonfuls of sugar directly into her mouth when her imperious stepmother isn't looking. She's also a brat—bossy, petulant, and rude. Emma, a decade older, chafes nearly as much at the mean smallness of their lives, though she has the awareness to wear it more gracefully. (And the resources to find her own escape as the houseguest of a sympathetic friend.) Irish-born Bridget, homesick and overworked, has come to hate her casually cruel employers; the furious Benjamin just hates everyone, especially the entitled fools who take for granted the many things he's been denied.
The table of misery is set, but is there motivation enough for murder? It would spoil Schmidt's literary game to say too much. What she does do, in dense, swooning paragraphs, is build an indelible mood. In one rapturous passage, Lizzie recalls her only great adventure, 10 weeks on a grand European tour chaperoned by distant cousins. She doesn't just see the continent, she devours it:
Butter, duck fat, liver fat, triple-cream brie, deep cherry-red wines, pear, clementine and lavender jelly, creme cakes, caviar, escargot in sautéed pine nuts and garlic butter. I did what the French did, licked my fingers, didn't care if people saw, what they thought. Father would've hated it, would have told me I was uncouth. I ate everything up, ate his money, was delightful everywhere I went.
(And her appetite isn't confined to pâté; at one point she runs her tongue along the velvet brim of a sunbonnet in a London shop, overcome.) But her brief taste of emancipation only makes it harder to return to the mouse-drab claustrophobia of home, with its dry biscuits and rancid mutton broth, loaded silences and long, empty afternoons.
As much as See is Borden's story, it's also an unvarnished glimpse of what it means to be female, in ways not strictly confined to the late 19th century. Lizzie and her sister, privileged by wealth and status but bound in almost every other way by the conventions of the day, are consigned to a particular fate largely because they are not beautiful. Bridget's every waking moment is subject to the family's whims, and so are her wages; with the little tin that holds her life savings in the elderly Mrs. Borden's hands, she couldn't leave if she wanted to. The ugly things that incubate in that kind of desperation don't bode well for anyone, but they do signal the deeper things that salacious tales of Women Who Kill hardly ever touch on, or gloss over in their race to get to the gory bits. Someone who has never had agency over anything—an old maid, a housemaid, a train-hopping vagrant—suddenly found a power more persuasive than anything on the other end of an ax handle. Though they would still have to be capable, of course, of crossing what most would consider an uncrossable line. The proxy thrill of a real-life murderess, maybe, is in that disconnect: that the fairer sex, biologically designed to birth and nurture life, might just decide one day to take it away.
Schmidt's style has its quirks. She drops definite articles, repeats phrases like incantations, and has a habit of turning unlikely nouns (termite, critter) into verbs. The vast gaps in her characters' education and experience somehow still allow them to share the same distinctive voice. But her protagonist comes more fully alive than almost any character in recent memory, and the final pages are a wild, mind-bending revelation. Maybe she was unhinged, or perfectly sane; maybe she was framed, or should have run away. The only fact that seems immutably true is that Lizzie Borden wanted more than anything to be free. What she got instead was infamy. A-

"Schmidt, Sarah: SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329204/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018. "See What I Have Done." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949046/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018. Baker, Jen. "See What I Have Done." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 29. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495034933/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 29 Jan. 2018.

• New York Times Book Review
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/books/review/see-what-i-have-done-sarah-schmidt.html
  Word count: 1385

  Inside Lizzie Borden’s House of Horror
  By PATRICK McGRATHAUG. 22, 2017
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  A contemporary drawing of Lizzie Borden at her trial. Credit Universal History Archive/UIG, via Getty Images

  By Sarah Schmidt
  328 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $26.

  The facts of the notorious case described by Sarah Schmidt in “See What I Have Done” are as follows. One sweltering day in August 1892, the father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Mass., were hacked to death in their home. Lizzie Borden stood trial for the murders and was acquitted. Doubt has been cast on that verdict ever since.

  Most readers of fiction will have last encountered Lizzie in Angela Carter’s story “The Fall River Axe Murders,” from her 1985 collection, “Black Venus.” Carter makes no bones as to the perpetrator of the crimes. Lizzie did it, in her view, and of all the various plausible motives it was the slaughter of her beloved pigeons by her father that proved the last straw. The dead pigeons also play a role in Schmidt’s account, but they aren’t central to it. For Carter the larger motive was money, not through any great eagerness on Lizzie’s part to inherit her father’s fortune but rather in reaction to the man’s miserliness: his meanness of spirit as well as his vindictive frugality.

  Carter’s tale is in fact an indictment of the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism, as embodied by a man of property in an industrial New England town in the late 19th century. She in effect presents the case for the defense, spelling out the mitigating circumstances that would tend to justify Lizzie’s actions. In this version, Lizzie Borden is a woman very much under the iron hand of an often bitter, joyless man who has, in addition, just killed all her pet pigeons with a hatchet. Lizzie didn’t give her father 41 whacks, as the children’s rhyme has it, only about a dozen, but they were quite enough.

  Schmidt’s version is less forensic. She tells a story not so much about money but about madness. Lizzie is only one of the four first-person narrators, but disorder is evident in her voice almost at once. First, there’s her stuttering repetition of certain words — “ticked ticked,” “sip sip,” and then her inappropriate response to the murders, as when she tells her father’s corpse that he should give up smoking. (“You ought to stop with the tobacco, Father. It makes your skin smell old.”) She thinks of his house as “brittle bone under foot,” and waits for a visiting neighbor’s heart to “burst through” her rib cage “onto the kitchen floor.”

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  This last image is telling. The permeability or porousness of the human body is stressed throughout the novel. There are repeated references to blood and bleeding, to smells of rot and urine, to self-cannibalization. “Her hair grew gray and began falling out into bowls of food. She ate a piece of herself each night,” Lizzie says of Abby, her stepmother, as the woman’s hacked and bloody corpse is discovered upstairs. And at one point Lizzie remembers a family meal and her stepmother slurping from her spoon: “I watched her tongue flick her lips, gray and thick. I imagined her tongue in Father’s mouth. What they must taste like.”

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  Eating and vomiting loom large in these pages. Schmidt isn’t reluctant to arouse a reader’s disgust. Much is made of the leg of mutton that over several very hot summer days is repeatedly served to the family in a broth. There are hints that the broth is poisoned, but it hardly requires human agency for this rotting bone to play havoc with the digestive systems of all concerned.

  So a breakdown of sorts occurs within the unstable bodies of the Borden family, and it mirrors the collapse of Lizzie’s mind, which in turn seems to reflect, or is even symptomatic of, the disintegrating character of this sweltering, unhygienic and claustrophobic household of locked doors and repressed emotions. The situation is hardly helped by the absence of any kind of indoor plumbing. It’s a festering house, pullulating and fetid, alive with rage, resentment, hatred and incestuous hunger: “Lizzie gave a small lip bite, tasted herself. She folded then unfolded her arms, pulled herself close to Abby, leaned in and kissed her on the mouth.… Lizzie stepped away, wiped her lips on her apron, left behind a bloodstain. The women said nothing.”

  The Borden house is, in short, a house of horror, as in its way is Lizzie Borden’s psyche. The dynamic interplay of these ideas and images works wonderfully in the first half of the novel, and goes far to create an atmosphere of truly grisly unwholesomeness. Schmidt convincingly establishes the conditions — as did Carter, in very different terms — in which that most unnatural of acts could occur, the apparent murder by a child of her parents. It’s fascinating, then, to learn that when Lizzie Borden went to trial, almost a year later, it took only 15 days for her to be found not guilty of the crime. Her social position and gender presumably carried weight with the all-male jury that acquitted her, but these questions aren’t explored here. Schmidt is preoccupied, rather, with the morbidity that permeates this unlovely household, both before and after the abomination. We learn, for example, in a passing mention from Lizzie to her housemaid, Bridget, that the woman who once lived next door to the Bordens had drowned her two children in a cistern in her basement, then slit her own throat. Casually, Lizzie tells Bridget that this woman was her father’s sister, her aunt. We hear no more about her.

  But in the Gothic novel a certain imperative applies. A strong tension must be sustained: a movement, preferably quickening and twisting as it advances, that will sweep readers into the very pit of their anxiety and fulfill the implicit promise of the story, which is to deliver them screaming into the final ghastly horror of the thing.

  The narrative structure of “See What I Have Done” squanders that tension. There are too many voices and shifts in the time scheme as the novel moves into its final hundred pages. The effect is to undermine the dynamic previously established, both in the Borden household and in Lizzie’s sickening mind. Lizzie’s is the best realized of these first-person voices, but her older sister, Emma, and Bridget, the maid, also have chapters of their own.

  They add little to the story other than background plot detail, touches of personality and local color, all of which are well observed but could have been spliced, to much greater effect, into Lizzie’s own increasingly deranged account of events. There’s a hint of a conspiracy at one point, but it’s veiled and obscure, and it vanishes almost at once.

  There’s another narrator, an unsavory character named Benjamin, but he has no real function in Lizzie’s story. He and the man who hired him, Lizzie’s Uncle John, become more prominent as the novel moves onward, but the reader has long since accepted Lizzie’s culpability and located its source. John and Benjamin are red herrings, little more than clutter that serves mainly to distract the reader from the glimpse of pitch darkness at the story’s heart.

  In “See What I Have Done,” Sarah Schmidt has created a lurid and original work of horror. It’s a pity that some of its force has been dissipated by its disorganized and overlong second half. As a result, the novel lacks the ever-tightening narrative torque that might more effectively have delivered the lovely shocker on the last page.

  Patrick McGrath is the author, most recently, of “Writing Madness,” a collection of his short fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel, “The Wardrobe Mistress,” is forthcoming.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/27/see-what-i-have-done-sarah-schmidt-lizzie-borden-book-review
  Word count: 1112

  See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt review – inside the mind of Lizzie Borden
  One of America’s most notorious murder cases inspires this feverish debut about family resentments and frustrations
  Justine Jordan
  Justine Jordan
  Thu 27 Apr 2017 09.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 04.41 EST
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  Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted of the murders of her father and stepmother in 1893.
  Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted of the murders of her father and stepmother in 1893. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
  “Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41 …” A century and a quarter after Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered with a hatchet on a sweltering Massachusetts morning, the skipping rhyme still resonates and the case of Lizzie Borden – arrested, tried and acquitted by a jury unable to believe a woman could do such a thing – continues to fascinate. It has been immortalised in countless books, a TV series, a short story by Angela Carter; a film starring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart is due to be released this year. The house where the killings took place is now a B&B-cum-museum, with the most requested room the one where Abby was murdered. Tours run every hour; free for children six and under. You can buy a Lizzie Borden doll.

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  Sarah Schmidt’s debut novel is a feverish reimagining of the day of the murders, the leadup and aftermath, told by four voices: Lizzie, her older sister Emma, the maid Bridget, and a dangerous stranger called Benjamin, who is linked to the family by Lizzie and Emma’s maternal uncle John.

  Many theories about the motivations for the killings have been advanced over the decades. Abby was actually Lizzie’s stepmother, her mother having died when she was very young, and their relationship was less than cordial. Now in her 30s but stuck at home, an eternal spinster, Lizzie must have resented her rich but miserly father settling property on Abby’s relatives; or maybe it was his recent slaughter of her beloved pet pigeons that sent her over the edge. Thriller writer Ed McBain proposed a discovered lesbian tryst between Lizzie and Bridget. Or perhaps Lizzie wasn’t the killer after all: there was talk at the time of a previous break-in, and murmurings of poisoning after sickness tore through the house. The murders have been pinned on the badly treated maid, on a spurned illegitimate son of Andrew Borden, on the uncle who seldom visited but just happened to be there at the time.

  Sarah Schmidt
  Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Probing obsessively at the faultline between love and hate’ … Sarah Schmidt. Photograph: Tinder Press
  Schmidt is less interested in contriving a new version of what “really” happened on that fateful morning in 1892 than in plunging the reader into a claustrophobic nexus of family resentments and frustrations, probing obsessively at the faultline between love and hate. At the heart of the novel is the relationship between Lizzie and Emma. “None of this would have happened if she hadn’t left me in the house,” declares Lizzie. Emma had been staying with a friend, desperate to escape the needy, domineering younger sister who demands that the door between their bedrooms be always kept open, consigning Emma to a cubicle within her own room as though swallowing her whole. “I would wake with my sister in my mouth,” says Emma, “hair strands, a taste of sour milk, like she was possessing me.” As the motherless girls age into women, under the thumb of their controlling, critical father, childhood affection for their stepmother curdles into contempt. The household has reached an emotional impasse, with even Bridget, yearning for her home in Ireland, trapped by the savings tin Mrs Borden has confiscated. “You shouldn’t be allowed to just leave!” shrieks Abby, who relieves her own feelings by repeatedly punching herself in the stomach.

  Nouns are twisted into verbs as blood 'rivers' down necks; heat rises, everything that was once fresh rots
  Something has to give. The narrative lurches back and forth, with Lizzie giving us impressionistic snatches of her movements on the day of the murders, narrated in a fervent babble somewhere between babytalk and the halting urgency of Emily Dickinson. Nouns are twisted into verbs as blood “rivers” down necks; heat rises, everything that was once fresh rots with the “death smells” of summer and characters repeatedly vomit up spoiled food from the “deep-pit” of themselves. It’s sensory overload, and overwhelming. All remark on the stink and stifling proximity of others, “the smell of sour yoghurt snaking out from somewhere inside her”, or the “air coming in and out like an ocean tide, smelling of old meat and butter”, as though oppressed by each other’s very life’s breath. They wonder, too, what they and others look like on the inside, beneath the sweaty flesh and many layers of dirty clothes: in the case of Mr and Mrs Borden, hacked about so that their brain matter and eye jelly is exposed, they find out. Characters leave what’s inside them – puke, rotten teeth – abandoned in corners, physical manifestations of the simmering rage and soured love that cannot be contained.

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  The blurring of voices and perceptions, particularly between Lizzie and Benjamin, and obsessive repetition of words and symbols only add to the irresistible momentum and fevered intensity of the book: part fairytale, part psychodrama. “Some men scare easy, some men are the scare. I knew what I was,” says Benjamin, a blankly terrifying agent of chaos who could be a projection of Lizzie’s most violent urges.

  At the same time, much backstory is cleverly withheld: there are hints at Lizzie’s instability, but we bring our own assumptions to her character; creepy uncle John is referred to repeatedly as “that man”, with a shiver of disgust, but we find out very little about him; mysterious Benjamin leaves us guessing. We get only glimpses into the particular hell of the Borden household; the fact that we can fill in the blanks from our own darkest places draws us closer, more uncomfortably, in. Schmidt’s unusual combination of narrative suppression and splurge makes for a surprising, nastily effective debut. Neighbours, doctor, police: visitors to the Borden house in the aftermath of the murders react with incredulity. “I don’t think I believe it myself,” says Lizzie.

• The Literary Review
  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-see-what-i-have-done-by-sarah-schmidt/
  Word count: 877

  A Review of See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
  Cynthia-Marie Marmo O'Brien

  (New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017)

  This debut novel from Sarah Schmidt takes as its subject the infamous Borden murders, still theorized and discussed more than a hundred years later, perhaps best known by the nefarious children’s rhyme assuming daughter Lizzie’s guilt: “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks, When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.”

  What makes the novel intriguing is the shifting of perspectives between Lizzie, sister Emma, maid Bridget, and n’er-do-well Benjamin, a man the Borden sisters’ uncle has hired to do something nasty to Mr. Borden in order to get him to reconsider how he’s treating his daughters and how he’s spending his money.

  The sisters are ten years apart at thirty-two and forty-two, and each has their own grievances with their father and stepmother. Older sister Emma feels cramped and overwhelmed by the demands of younger Lizzie; “there had been years of making nests for Lizzie. I had grown tired of it but there I was.” She asserts that their father is “always putting Lizzie first, always taking her side, never asking my opinion.” But Emma also observes that Lizzie hates both parents, something she knows because “there we were, me and my sister, our bodies inseparable. There is nothing that escapes blood.”

  It seems as if every character in the book has a reason to want Mr. and Mrs. Borden dead, whether it is the scheming Lizzie, Bridget the maid whose savings Mrs. Borden has taken, Benjamin the hired man, John the uncle, or even Emma the disgruntled sister. Yet Emma was away visiting friends in another town when the murders take place, putting her in the clear. It’s Lizzie who finds Mr. Borden and who insists that Mrs. Borden had gone out that morning to visit the sick, delaying the finding of her body upstairs. What does Lizzie know and what has she done? The book perambulates around these questions, taking us deep inside the minds of the other characters but always swirling around these two mysteries.

  Emma wonders, “How quickly does the body forget its history?” and readers must wonder how quickly could Lizzie have put the murders out of her head if she was responsible for them. In the aftermath, she seems in shock; “a fog settled in my mind. I had the feeling of wanting to stroke Father’s beard and face until he looked like the past.” And, “inside my head a butcher pounded all sense out of my ears and onto the dining room table.” Prior to the murders, Lizzie went on a voyage to Europe and of that time she fondly reflects, “Nobody knew me, didn’t expect anything from me. I wanted to stay like that forever.” This desire to stay forever in a place without expectations mirrors how Lizzie acts after the murders: not wanting to respond to police inquiries and wishing she were another version of herself, one who would answer only to herself.

  Of all of the characters, Emma’s grief seems the most genuine and uncomplicated –and yet even Emma seems to be wondering if her sister has done the unthinkable. “Every adult that had ever held me as a baby was dead and no one would ever carry me again. I looked at my sister, looked at blood. That grief inside the heart.” This seems to suggest a grief beyond the death of her parents, a grief at suspecting who is responsible for the murders, perhaps her own flesh and blood: this is a suspicion that Emma does not want to process or confront, yet causes her heartache.

  Amidst the aftermath of the murders, Emma ponders her complicated feelings for her younger sister, admitting to herself that “there have been times when Lizzie was away from home that I nursed absence” but also acknowledging “always two ways of feeling: relief and loneliness.”

  In response, Lizzie ponders some viscerally disturbing punishments for her sister:

  Emma’s hideous desire for answers made my heart beat faster. She made my teeth want to sink into her flesh and eat her out of my life, made me want to swarm her mind and sort through all the thoughts she had of me, that I was being too stubborn, I was being too secretive, I was being bad, I was, I was.
  This is a book that strongly suggests Lizzie was responsible for the deaths, but spends most of its time exploring the web of people around the murdered parents, rather than the murder itself. “I’m waiting for the best moment to be my true self,” Lizzie thinks, “Everything will be different then, you’ll see.” In this telling of the true crime story, nearly everyone has something to hide about their true self, regardless of who committed the murders. And in that fact, there is a lesson for all of us about the weight of lies, omissions and conflicting desires under one roof in the aftermath of tragedy.

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