lip lit: skylights and screen doors

In a previous article, I mentioned how much I loved Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I love AHWOSG for the same reason I love Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking: they are both about intense personal tragedies, but they are full of humour, self-deprication and wit. A commenter mentioned they thought I would enjoy Skylights and Screendoors by Dean Smart, because even though it was about the author’s brother’s murder, there was lightness in the text. I had high expectations for Skylights and Screendoors and was thrilled when I was sent a review copy.

You might not be familiar with the Pamela Smart case, likely because it happened in the United States in the early nineties, when the majority of lip staff and readers were still figuring out how to master the whole walking or shoe-lace tying thing. I only knew of it because it served as the inspiration for the Gus Van Sant movie To Die For.

The Cliff’s Notes version is this: in 1990, 22-year-old Pamela Smart seduced a 16-year-old student into murdering her 24-year-old husband, Gregg. Pamela admitted to having an affair with the student, but still refuses to confess to orchestrating the murder. She’s currently serving a life sentence in jail.

I worked on a memoir about my own family tragedy during my MA, and was lucky enough to work on it closely with two established authors who had published their own. They agreed with me on this: writing about yourself and your family is excruciatingly difficult. And not just because it’s difficult to approach characterisation objectively, but because you know too much. When you know details about mannerisms and temperament so intimately, it can be difficult to remember your readers have no idea.

And I think this is what let Smart down, because apart from Gregg, we never get a real sense of the other characters. This might be because time moves and jumps around so quickly and erratically. The novel is quite short, and I think it would have been better served if it covered the same time-span but was doubled in length. In saying this, the novel is a beautiful and touching tribute to Gregg, and Smart succeeds in allowing the reader to know, miss and mourn him.

Skylights and Screendoors would be a fantastic read for those that have extensive knowledge of the case, and wish to hear about it from Smart’s point of view. Likewise, I would recommend it to those who like true-crime or essayistic works. But for those who aren’t familiar with the case and prefer their non-fiction to read more like a fictional novel, it probably doesn’t hold enough detail and colour to hold your attention. The novel is serious and sombre, and there is an understandable and completely validated bitterness and resentful tone throughout the narration. This isn’t a bad thing, nor does it detract from the novel in anyway. But if you find it difficult to tolerate the heavy, and prefer your tragedy served with a dose of bleak humour, then it will be a taxing work for you to read.

You can purchase Skylights and Screendoors here.

image credit