19. Louise Fitzhugh — Harriet the Spy with Leslie Brody and Laura Mazer

Episode 19 (Louise Fitzhugh with Laura Mazer and Leslie Brody)

AMY: So, Kim, I figured between the both of us we’d read just about every seminal children’s book worth reading, but turns out I was wrong. We both somehow missed out on one of the funniest, most endearing, socially aware and subtly subversive kids’ books to have ever made it to print.

KIM: I know! It’s a great book, and it’s also a little embarrassing to admit we’re both late to the party where this classic 1960s-era title is concerned. Especially since it’s all about a young girl who wants to be a writer. 

AMY: It is so up our alley, and we were both instantly smitten with the book when we recently read it. I feel like I had heard of the title as a kid or maybe seen it on shelves at the library, but I bypassed it a million times, and I don’t know why I never read it!

KIM: And the fact that it was kind of a radical book in children’s literature, you’d think that the author behind it — Louise Fitzhugh — would be more of a household name.

AMY: Well, we’ve thankfully got two very special guests today on Lost Ladies of Lit — literary agent Laura Mazer and biographer, Leslie Brody — to tell us all about Louise Fitzhugh and her famous children’s novel, which we’re guessing some of you are probably very familiar with. And if you’re still wondering what book we’re talking about, let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[Intro music]

INTERVIEW

AMY: Okay, so let’s just dive right into introducing our first guest. Laura Mazer is a literary agent with Wendy Sherman Associates. She was previously executive editor of Seal Press, and among the titles she helped guide through publication are Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race? as well as From Cradle to Stage: Stories From Mothers Who Rocked and Raised Rock Stars by Virginia Grohl. (And yes, that’s Dave Grohl’s mom.) Laura has worked as managing editor of Counterpoint Press and executive editor at Soft Skull Press, and prior to joining the book-publishing industry, she oversaw editorial operations for Creators Syndicate, a global news agency representing some of the most influential opinion writers and editorial cartoonists of the day. She was also a senior editor at Brill's Content magazine, as well as special sections editor at The Los Angeles Times. 

KIM: As a board member of the OpEd project she is a champion for underrepresented voices in the publishing world, and like us, she has an interest in resurrecting the legacies of forgotten women writers. Welcome to the show, Laura Mazer!

LAURA MAZER: Thank you! I’m so happy to be here!

AMY: When we first discussed having you join us for an episode of the podcast, you suggested that we could talk about Louise Fitzhugh, who wrote the 1964 children’s novel Harriet the Spy. So I have two initial questions for you: One, did you grow up with Harriet, or did you discover her after the fact the way Kim and I did? And also, what kind of impact did the book have on you when you read it?

LAURA: Oh, I definitely grew up with Harriet. In fact, I have my copy still. I keep it on my shelf all the time, right near me. I loved Harriet. Harriet gave me permission to be a little different. Harriet gave me permission to spy on people and learn what I could beyond the confines of what I was being told. I asked my parents for a toolbelt for a birthday present one year, because Harriet wears a toolbelt with her spy tools that she can wander the neighborhood. And I do remember my father looking at me a little strangely and saying, “They don’t make them in your size.” But I did grow up with Harriet. I adored her. I felt that she was something of a lifeline for kids who did not want to live up to the girly-girl expectations that, in that era, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, we were expected to be.

AMY: So I guess that leads to the fact that you were editor of the book that we’re going to be also discussing today, Leslie Brody’s biography of Louise Fitzhugh. So you must have been excited to acquire this book.

LAURA: Oh, absolutely! When Leslie and I started talking about this, I knew right away this is going to be a (excuse the idiom, but) labor of love.

KIM: So Harriet the Spy sold 2.5 million copies in its first five years in print, and by 2019, over five million copies had been sold worldwide. Laura, could you give our listeners a quick overview of what the book’s about for anyone who’s actually unfamiliar with the plot?

LAURA: Oh, I will do my best, and for anyone who is unfamiliar with the plot, please go read it, because if there’s one thing that I can assure you, it is not dull or boring, regardless of your age. Eleven-year-old Harriet Welsh lives in the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her parents and her beloved nanny, called Ol’ Golly. Harriet is sensitive and perceptive and sometimes crabby, and she aspires to be a professional writer and a spy. She takes these goals very seriously — this is not a game. This is a practice that is at first encouraged by Ol’ Golly, who is a reader of great literature and encourages her writing. Some of her observations that she writes in her notebook are unsparing caricatures — snap judgments. Others are deeper examinations of what she’s discovering around her, but regardless, Harriet really is curious about people and the way the world works, and that writing what she sees around her is seminal to her understanding of who she is and how everything functions as a society. Every day after school, after cake and milk, she goes out dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt with her toolbelt, and she goes out on a spy route. This is a route that’s regular; every day she goes to the same places. She hides in dumb waiters, and she hides in back alleys and listens to conversations and observes facial expressions. Families, children, elderly, the rich, the poor, the marketplace… she listens and watches and writes it all down. One day, a classmate finds her notebook and passes it around, and all of her friends find out what she has said about them in her notebook, and you can imagine what happens from there. Harriet is ostracized. If that weren’t bad enough, at the very same time, her beloved nanny who raised her, Ol’ Golly, she gets engaged and she moves away. She was really the one adult that Harriet had truly admired and relied upon as a child. Between losing the esteem of her classmates and her friends and Ol’ Golly going away, and suddenly the adults are telling her that her notebooks are not healthy and they’re forbidding her from writing in her notebooks — it’s all too much. And I think I should leave it there, because what happens next, if I were to tell you, would be too much of a spoiler. But I will say that by the end of the novel, she is changed, and she learns a way to hold her own truths to herself and navigate the world around her that’s so complicated. It’s a beautiful story.

AMY: Yeah, and the book is just filled with so many swings of emotion, too, like one minute you’re laughing out loud, one minute you’re fighting back tears a little bit. It’s really a must-read for anybody, child or adult, who has an interest in literature or the process of writing. I found it so fascinating, so provocative, and so too, is the story of the woman who wrote it, Louise Fitzhugh.

KIM: Which leads us to introducing our second guest (we have two today) Leslie Brody. She’s a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Redlands in California, the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts award and the PEN Center USA West literary award for creative nonfiction. We are thrilled to get to talk with her about her latest biography: Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, which was published by Seal Press in December. This biography was among The New York Times’ list of seven new books to read in December, and The Wall Street Journal calls it an “engaging” and “highly enjoyable” read.  So good to have you here, Leslie!

LESLIE: Oh, thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.

AMY: Before we dive any deeper into Louise’s own life story, let’s focus a little on Harriet to start. Thanks to Donald Trump, feminists everywhere are happy to claim the title of “nasty woman.” And the character of Harriet is described (even by Fitzhugh, herself) as a “nasty little girl.” And Leslie, I’m guessing that connection was not lost on you, based on how you sort of started the book off.

LESLIE: Of course. Louse Fitzhugh began writing Harriet the Spy the same year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Seventeen-year-old singer Leslie Gore came out with her song “You Don’t Own Me,” with the lyrics “don’t tell me what to do and don’t tell me what to say,” and Gloria Steinem published “A Bunny’s Tale.” So Harriet is raucous, she’s unruly, she’s unwilling to compromise. She sees phonies and finks everywhere which is sort of a reflection of the early 1960s alternative counterculture. And she’s a pint-sized harbinger whose schoolroom battles for respect and understanding look, in microcosm, like the battles for equality many women and girls would wage over the coming years.

KIM: It seems like  Harriet the Spy was pretty revolutionary for a children’s book. I mean, in the earlier part of the 20th century, people were reading more sweet and wholesome books, and suddenly here we have this protagonist who is pretty much the opposite of “Pollyanna.” It seems like it broke a lot of taboos in children’s literature. Laura, can you explain a little bit about the “New Realism” movement in publishing and maybe how Harriet the Spy fits within that?

LAURA: Sure. Harriet was one of the very first children’s characters that was not saccharine, sanitized… it didn’t present a vision of children’s lives that were full of “Mommy and Daddy and a dog, Spot, skipping through the park every day.” Louise allowed Harriet to be real. She could be angry. She could be ill-mannered. Adults could be fallible. Babies could be ugly. 

AMY: Little girls can plot to blow up their school…

LAURA: Yes! Absolutely! They could be angry and resentful. Harriet has a best friend named Janie. Janie is a self-determined scientist and she has decided that she is going to blow up the school. She’s just waiting for the right time and the right materials in her laboratory to do this thing. Harriet is not necessarily against this. She thinks that Janie’s crazy, but she also understands why she wants to blow up the school, because look at all of these adults around them. Adults are feeding them a load of bunk, and the kids all know it! This is a book that allows children to speak their truth and to be suspicious of adults. It allows children to be suspicious of each other. At that era, in terms of a “spy story,” spies and girls, we had the conventional one in Nancy Drew, right? And even if you’re going to look for the so-called “tomboy” prototype character, we have Laura Ingalls. But Nancy Drew was so lovely and gracious, and her manners were always impeccable and her dress was never creased. And if you look at Laura Ingalls (who I absolutely adore, don’t get me wrong. She was also a lifeline to me in my childhood) but she was, umm… “hard work, respect for adults, do your part around the farm and don’t complain.” All these wonderful, noble attributes. Adults could look to Laura Ingalls and say, “Why can’t you be more like her?” Well, nobody’s pointing to Harriet and saying to their children, “Can you be more like Harriet, please?” Because Harriet is difficult, and she does give adults a hard time. She calls them on their crap. She curses and yells. She’s real. And we hadn’t really seen that in children’s literature until Louise came along, wrote this story, created the character. She knew adults did not have it all figured out, and that left her to figure things out for herself. If you can’t trust the people who are giving you the rules of life, then you’re going to have to figure them out yourself, and that’s what she did. She was a self-proclaimed spy trying to make sense of the world around her, all by using the written word.

AMY: I think that’s so right because I have an 11-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son, and I read out loud to them a lot. With this one, they were obsessed with it. (Case in point, they were rolling around on the carpet pretending to be onions for about a full week following our read-aloud, the way Harriet does in the book). And I think it’s true that they were just enthralled by the fact that Harriet was so outrageous and so naughty, and it felt almost a little naughty for them, by extension, to get to be a part of it. My husband would sort of be walking in and out of the room while we were reading this, and he was appalled. He was just like, “What are you reading them? This girl is awful!” He was laughing, too, but he was definitely in disbelief about Harriet’s behavior, and I think that really kind of sums up the controversy this book stirred up when it came out. So Leslie, can you weigh in on that a little bit?

Leslie: Well, Louise created Harriet to be a nasty little girl. That’s how she described her in the letters she wrote James Merrill, the poet, who was a longtime friend of hers. She wrote that she was creating “a nasty little girl who keeps notes on all her friends.” And what she intended was to create a child who was a free-thinking individual, and she mocked adults. She did it in a satirical way to make clear their flaws. So a lot of kids love it for the way she mocks authority. She’s a heroine. A liberator.

AMY: And yet, there were some parent groups, very conservative-minded people, that were kind of angry when this book came out, right?

LESLIE: Yeah! Oh yeah. Not everybody approved of her breaking and entering homes or speaking truth to power. I would say that it was more common to think that children should be seen and not heard.

LAURA: The other thing that we haven’t touched on yet, which I think is fascinating, is it’s not just Harriet’s character that is so disruptive, but it’s Harriet’s awareness of issues like money and class and race that come in and out of the narrative throughout the whole story in a way that we hadn’t really seen children being aware of these adult issues. And that’s truthful! And for me as a kid, for other people I know as a child, we were very aware of financial strains that our parents had. Marital arguments. Setbacks that adults were experiencing filtered down to kids, but then they tried to pretend that they’re shielding us from it, but are they really? Harriet wasn’t shielded, and neither were her classmates. So Louise’s acknowledgment that kids could have that kind of adult awareness of these issues… that has to be at the heart of why so many kids felt seen and heard by Harriet.

AMY: I totally wish that I had read this book when I was younger to just know that, like, my own weirdo thoughts were not so weird. You know?

KIM: Exactly.

LAURA: Yes! And she had so many weirdo thoughts! That’s what’s so great about her. We can relate to the weirdness.

KIM: Leslie, before we jump into Fizhugh’s own fascinating history, can you give us an idea of what she thought about being a “children’s author” considering it wasn’t really her game plan initially?

LESLIE: Sure. She wanted to make some money. She was on an allowance from her family and she was really eager to be independent. She was sort of embarrassed that at her age she was still receiving money from this very wealthy family, from her trust fund, and she was trying all sorts of things to earn this independence (except actually get a job). That was one thing she was not prepared to do. She had one job, as far as I could tell in all my research. She was a gift-wrapper at S. Klein on the square in New York City for about two weeks, and she had the opportunity, among other things, to wrap an entire couch with gift wrap and bows. But she quit and that was really her only job. But she thought she would try to write a children’s book as she had had some success writing Suzuki Bean with Sandra Scoppettone, who had been her collaborator then. So she kind of spent some time sketching out a proposal for a children’s book and came up with about nine pages and a couple of sketches for the characters. That was it. She thought, “Well, I’ll try this. I’ll send it to my agent and see what she can do with it.” The agent thought it was delightful, sent it off to Ursula Nordstrom, and the rest is history. Her friends said she always presented herself as an artist first. Her close friend, Maryjane Meaker, who came to be known as the author M.E. Kerr, said she didn’t even know that Louise was writing a book until Harriet was published. She had started writing Harriet as a commercial venture, and it sort of overwhelmed her life. It became the one thing that she was recognized for, and her painting was something she loved deeply and something she always wished she could be recognized for as well. But it kind of went into eclipse when Harriet emerged.

AMY: Did she begrudge at all the fact that she was most known for this children’s book, or was she happy about it? I mean, when she was younger I know she wanted to be, like, a serious poet.

LESLIE: Yeah. She always thought that poetry and fine arts were higher on the hierarchy of art. Being a novelist was something she deeply wanted to do, but she also was very funny. She was a comic writer and a satirist and somehow she just found her way into this book.

AMY: So like Harriet, Louise Fitzhugh was very much a spitfire in her own right She was outspoken and defiant and very much ahead of her time when it came to racial equality and women’s lib and class consciousness. Which is actually a little unexpected given her background, because she came from a high-society family in the Deep South. Like you said, Leslie, she was a trust fund baby. And the picture you paint of Memphis during that era in your biography is so amazingly descriptive, I loved it. It totally drew me in. But even more compelling than all that is the story of Fitzhugh’s early life. As a baby, she was at the center of a very public scandal, the truth of which she didn’t fully learn about until she was in her early adulthood. It’s quite a saga. Can you tell our listeners quickly about that story?

LESLIE: Sure. In the summer before she left Memphis to start college at Bard to study poetry and painting, she worked at the local newspaper, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, for one day as far as I can tell. She was assigned or she found her way into the newspaper morgue, which is where all the old articles are indexed, and among the archives Louise found a massive folder dedicated to the history of the Fitzhughs. She found the clippings about her parents’ scandalous divorce in 1927 and she found it traumatic. Her mother’s lawyers had been outmatched in the courtroom and her mother had been defamed outlandishly. Her father won custody, and until she was around five, had told Louise that her mother was dead. So she found this all out and she left work, and I don’t think she stayed until 5 p.m.

KIM: Yeah, one might not after reading something like that and discovering such an interesting story about yourself and your past.

AMY: And there was the one detail, I think, which really haunted her: that as a baby, I guess there was the accusation that her father’s family had made against her mother that said that her mother had thrown her onto a sofa. It’s a claim the mother denies, but it seems like Louise was always really shocked and horrified by that, in particular.

LESLIE: Yeah. I mean, she was dedicated to protecting children’s imaginations and protecting them from abuse — all kinds of abuse. Emotional abuse, physical abuse… and she felt that she had been abused in some way; although she didn’t remember it, it was something she read about.

KIM: I’m just going to read a quote here from Leslie’s book to give everyone an inkling of what Louise’s childhood was like: “There was the eccentric opera-singing grandmother who would fling money out the window while somebody stood below with a basket. A crazy uncle confined to the attic, sawing up dolls. The father who kidnapped her, then told her, falsely, that her mother was dead. Not to mention the servants who would turn her grieving mother away from the door of her father’s house.”

   So, it’s no surprise that she had a complicated relationship with her family as a result of all this. How do you think it shaped who she went on to be in life? It seems like she wanted to get as far away from the South as she possibly could.

LESLIE: Yeah, for sure. She had mixed feelings about her family. She decided in her teens that her father was controlling and took against him. She loved her grandmother, but the only people she felt comfortable with as a child were the household staff. She grew up during the Jim Crow era in Tennessee and came to abhor the milieu of white supremacy, which she fled as soon as she was able. And she always recognized, however, that the elements of her childhood made a good story, and she relied on them in her painting and writing.

AMY: So in high school then, she began having relationships with women — she was a lesbian — but I was struck by how many men she also had throwing themselves at her. She was basically swatting them away like flies at times (and she even eloped with one of them, though that marriage didn’t even last longer than 24 hours I don’t think). But it leads me to think she must have been an amazingly charismatic person to have all these people pining away for her. So what was her personality really like? Did she have a lot of “Harriet” in her?

LESLIE: She was charismatic. She was very attractive, high-spirited, charming. They said she was a wonderful dancer and she had a beautiful singing voice. She was very petite. Her friends referred to her as having a fairy-like figure. She was a sprite or a nymph. She had a swagger, though, and she didn’t suffer fools. One thing about her: she liked to play devil’s advocate. She was very quarrelsome. She didn’t like to lose an argument.

AMY: So Fitzhugh eventually settles down in New York city’s Greenwich Village. And once again, Leslie, you do a brilliant job of describing this world for us in vivid detail and historical perspective. Fitzhugh had the trust-fund to support her artistic endeavors, and she also had a series of long-term girlfriends who influenced her life. It seemed like an amazing, intellectually-and-artistically stimulating existence she was carving out for herself, and I was super jealous of her lifestyle in her 20s and all the influential people she was pal’ing around with! 

KIM: Yeah, I don’t think I had enough fun in my 20s. I wish I’d had more fun.

AMY: I wish I had that fun, and I wish I had her trust fund.

KIM: Yeah. That, too!

LESLIE: Yeah, in her youth she fell in love with France Burke, who was an artist herself and the daughter of Kenneth Burke, who was a philosopher and critic. Through the Burkes, she met Greenwich Village royalty like poet Marianne Moore, author Djuna Barnes, photographer Berenice Abbott, Dorothy Day… and later, Louise’s social circle expanded to include many high-flying, mostly queer careerwomen who, in their youth, had crashed through ceilings in literary and artistic professions. The friend circle had some grand parties and I always loved reading about those. Some costume balls were legendary, like the one with the sophisticated theme of “After Mayerling” set in late 19th-century Vienna.

AMY: I wished I had been invited to those costume parties. They sounded really fun! I don’t think I would have been on the invite list, but… Okay, so Fitzhugh’s first foray into the publishing world came about when she illustrated and collaborated on a book that was a spoof on the Eloise children’s books by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight. And Leslie, you sort of mentioned this briefly. It was called Suzuki Bean. Fill us in a little more on that, because I love the idea of this book.

LAURA: Oh, yeah, it’s a great book. Really brilliant. Louise and Sandra Scoppettone were buddies, drinking buddies mainly, in the Village. They were looking for a great idea and the way to make an impression as authors and artists. The Eloise at the Plaza books were hugely popular and really successful. It was an era of novelty books and spoofs, and they decided to try to write a downtown version of Eloise. Suzuki is a baby Beatnik. Her father is a poet, and her mother makes sculptures out of tin cans. Her best friend at school is a boy from Uptown from a family of snobby socialites, and the book is a satire about children who feel they don’t belong in the place they are raised. Eventually, they both run off to start what is essentially a Utopian commune somewhere where people will be accepted for who they are. That is obviously a theme that runs through Louse’s work. 

AMY: It’s such a clever idea, to do a spoof off those books. I love it, and I tried to find the book at the library, and did not have any luck. And you can’t buy it, except for a lot of money. What happened to it? Why is it not available anymore? Does anybody know? 

LESLIE: Sandra says that the estate was not helpful when she wanted to publish it. They had some falling out and so I guess they couldn’t agree on rights.

AMY: I feel like that book would still be popular today if it could be reissued somehow.

LESLIE: Oh, yeah. It’s a tragedy.

KIM: Yeah, that’s a real loss.

AMY: So, like many people, I really loved the character of Harriet’s nanny, Ol’Golly in Harriet the Spy. She’s not exactly Mary Poppins, but Laura, please fill our listeners in on why she’s so great in this book.

LAURA: Ol’ Golly has to be one of the most profound, special, heartening characters, and thank goodness she is there, because there really are no other adults in this book that provide some solid barometer for Harriet. Here’s Harriet with adults (teachers, parents) telling her, “Go be a good girl. Wear a pretty dress. Put a smile on your face. Be nice to your friends. Be nice to adults. Don’t cause any problems.” And Ol’ Golly is willing to go a little deeper with her. Ol’ Golly is willing to grapple with more complex issues, the philosophical pushes and pulls of daily life. And she is the one adult that nurtures her. So here we have a character, a child, being given that nurturing life-lesson program from somebody who, not only we don’t expect it from because she’s set up to be this stern, disciplinarian governess-type nanny, but underneath those top level layers, there’s all this warmth and intelligence. And meanwhile her own teachers and her own parents really aren’t getting her. They’re not understand why she won’t just fall in line and behave the way people want her to. So here’s Ol’ Golly, who spouts life lessons from Dostoevsky… who takes her on this little mini daytrip to visit her own mother, who does not behave in any way that Harriet would have expected from the life she’s seen so far in the Upper East Side, you know, this life of privilege. Ol’ Golly wants her to see more and to understand more, and that is what Harriet wants, so even if Ol’ Golly isn’t always right on the mark, and even if Ol’ Golly does leave, which she eventually does (she pursues her own life), Harriet needs her. Harriet needs her to center her, to give her just that occasional spark of confidence that even though she is looking at life in a way that other adults seem to be telling her to stop it, cut it out, that maybe she’s really onto something good, and that she should be true to herself and what she sees around her.

AMY: So that basically also takes us to the most pivotal advice that Ol’ Golly gives Harriet at the end of the book: “Sometimes you have to lie.” Laura, what do you think Fitzhugh was ultimately trying to say with that sentiment, and why do you think it’s the perfect title for Leslie’s book?

LAURA: Oh, I just love this title for her book! Leslie knows that I adore this title. We thought about a lot of different ways to title the book, and we just kept coming back to this one because it clicked. It sings the story that is Harriet and Louise. I don’t know that I can crawl inside of Louise’s head enough to really know what she was thinking, but I will say this: If you had to choose one core theme we can take away from Harriet the Spy (and maybe Louise, too, if we’re going to take it that one step further) it’s that nothing is simple. That life is complex and that the lessons we’re taught as smaller children that seem so straightforward, they seem so simple — “Always tell the truth!” When 9-year-olds lie, they feel badly, but by the time you get to 11, you’re starting to learn that sometimes you do have to lie to get by in this world. To be successful. To not be ostracized. To make connections with others. Sometimes that means that the better thing to do is to do the thing you were always taught not to do. And it allows a children’s book to actually be, like, what I consider a morality tale. Yeah, the morality at the core of it is flipped. She took the script and flipped it by saying, “Lying is sometimes the better, higher moral act, but you’re going to know that and own it now because you are an adult.” And that’s what we learned from Harriet. Harriet has always known this world is a crazy place to live. Harriet has always known that the adults are full of it, and she’s finally being allowed to own that truth for herself and for Ol’ Golly who gives her that advice. Yeah, I think that’s at the center of this book and the whole story for her.

AMY: So when I first saw the title, Sometimes You Have to Lie and found out that Fitzhugh was a lesbian, I thought for sure that she was closeted, that as a children’s writer, she was having to keep this under wraps about herself and she had, like, a double life. Then I started reading the book and I found out that wasn’t the case at all. She was actually very open about being a lesbian. So talk to me a little bit about that.

LESLIE: For one thing, she had a lot of money and she had a lot of friends, and once she left Memphis and went to what was a sort of protected environment in Greenwich Village, where it was kind of more typical that people could be themselves more often (not always), she just decided in 1950 when she received an inheritance from her grandmother that she would never wear women’s clothing again. And so, typically, she had fantastic suits made for herself. She wore a lot of capes. We’re talking about moving into the 60s, so she had a very mod look. So in 2005 there was a librarian named K.T. Horning, who published an article in the Horn Book in which she talked about Harriet the Spy’s influence on her own childhood and observed a queer subtext throughout the book. Horning interprets Ol’ Golly’s advice to Harriet (so we’re getting back to that again)  — that sometimes you have to lie, but to yourself you must always tell the truth — as evidence of Louise’s embedded instructions to gay kids: You’re not alone. You know, look around, be careful, come out when it’s safe, we’re here. You know, there were a lot of homophobes during the culture wars, and Horning suggests there are secret messages in Harriet the Spy, benign and comforting ones which offer fellowship and reassurance to young people figuring themselves out.

LAURA: Louise’s legacy is often noted by writers: “I became a writer because of Harriet the Spy.” “I became a writer because of Louise Fitzhugh.” But what is also true right next-door to that is that there are a lot of kids who grew up to come out and be confident and comfortable with their own sexuality and to say, “I always suspected that Harriet was gay.” And again, by translation, it wasn’t Harriet, it was Louise who created her. Does that mean a straight person can’t create a gay character? No, of course not. But to have understood what it meant to be a different kid in an era when fitting in was everything — that was essential to the LGBTQ movement. And I love that Louise was so willing to go against the grain. She always was. We have to remember that yes, she did live in the counterculture 60s, but she began living her own life well before that. I think that probably, to some extent, fueled her willingness to go to the space where, “I’m going to wear the men’s suits and I am going to flirt with women and be with women and be done with you men. I don’t need any more men in my bed, I’m over that!” And not worry about what people would think because she had experimented with it enough to be at home with it.

AMY: So I understand, Leslie, that you also came late to finding Harriet the Spy, and I guess you are in good company with Kim and I in that regard. So tell us a little bit about that.

LESLIE: Well, I’m exactly the same age as Harriet the Spy. When she was 11-years-old, I was 11-years old, and I was born in the Bronx, and Harriet lived in an elite quarter of Manhattan, but we still shared a lot of the cultural references around New York City in the 50s and 60s. When the book was published in 1964, I wasn’t reading kids books anymore. I had missed the wave with Harriet and the New Realism, and I was reading adult books — I liked to think they were “big books,” like The Agony & the Ecstasy or Rebecca. 

AMY: You were like a 40-year-old in an 11-year-old’s body.

LESLIE: I was. I was particularly fond of reading the memoirs of Borscht Belt comedians. That was a specialty of mine. So it was, gosh, it wasn’t until 1988. I was a playwright at the time. I was hired to write an adaptation of Harriet the Spy (I’d never read it before) for the Minneapolis Children’s Theater company. Again, I remember reading through it several times and having the response that you have had as well, as you talked about at the beginning of this program. Completely stunned at how I had somehow missed this artifact, this incredible experience and how after all this time, somehow, this rendezvous with fate had happened. I wasn’t writing biographies for another 10 or 15 years, but once I started, Louise was in my mind and I just wanted to follow her and see where she’d lead. And then I met Laura, and Laura also wanted to do that, so we came up with a project together.

KIM: If you haven’t already, go read Harriet the Spy.  And then pick up a copy of Sometimes You Have To Lie. It’s wonderful, and we should also point out that Leslie has another biography under her belt, one on author Jessica Mitford.

AMY: Leslie, we might have to invite you back for a Hons & Rebels discussion, which would be awesome!

KIM: So Laura, and Leslie, it’s been wonderful getting to talk to you about Louise Fitzhugh, and we are so grateful to you for turning us on to Harriet the Spy after all these years!

Laura: Oh, enjoy it! I’m so glad you did! It’s never too late

Leslie: Thank you so much for having us!

[Interview ends]

KIM: So, Amy, what did we learn from today’s episode? We learned that “nasty little girls” can grow up to be badass feminists.

AMY: We learned that it’s never too late to discover a great children’s book.

KIM: And we learned that sometimes… you have to lie.

AMY: And that’s all for today’s episode. If you like what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast. 

KIM: Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss a single episode. For a full transcript, check out our show notes, and visit LostLadiesofLit.com for further reading materials. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.