Following the lead of the school bullies, even Harriet’s closest friends turn on her. When Harriet’s classmates, without Harriet’s consent, obtain and read her notebook-which spells out PRIVATE on the cover-they are horrified and start a campaign against her. With her matter-of-fact tone and acerbic humor, Harriet the Spy is the quintessential story of a tomboy-a queer heroine in childhood. Much of the humor and intrigue of Harriet the Spy is the heroine’s own interior monologue, a relentless string of crude, or, as we say today, very real observations, externalized by the notes she takes: “DOES PINKY WHITEHEAD’S MOTHER HATE HIM?” She writes about a boy in her school, “IF I’D HAD HIM I’D HATE HIM.” It is hard to tell whether Harriet’s influence on queer writers comes from her insufferable writing ambitions, her gender-agnostic bearings, or that she finds her world incomprehensible and repressive.

Harriet is unstoppable: she eats cake and egg creams in the afternoons, argues with grown-ups, climbs onto buildings and into dumbwaiters to spy, all while filled with that kind of youthful rage one can only find in children.

Now Harriet’s author, Louise Fitzhugh, is the subject of a biography-Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have t o Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy, a succinct and readable portrait of the short-lived and charismatic lesbian writer and illustrator. Readers young and old, however, sixty years ago as much as today, find in Harriet a cathartic release and creative permission. As training for one day becoming a famous novelist, she ventures on a daily “spy route,” stalking a handful of brownstones on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, secretly watching her friends and neighbors, chronicling their business in a private notebook using a tone so deadpan and factual it borders on cruel. Welch, the titular character of Louise Fitzhugh’s iconic children’s book Harriet the Spy is eleven years old and determined to write everything down.

The Creative Brilliance of Louise Fitzhugh: On Sometimes You Have to Lie by Leslie Brody

Harriet the spy book