Book review: Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

Heavy spoilers throughout, I guess

October was a dry reading month. I discovered a new game app (to be reviewed later) that sucked me in and killed any desire I had to read. I had to work on Halloween night, though, and grabbed this book from the children's books section of the library where I work, so I could read it at the desk. Harriet the Spy has pretty much always been on my radar as a children's classic, but I've never read it.

Amazon summary:
Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. In her notebook, she writes down everything she knows about everyone, even her classmates and her best friends. Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before she can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together?

I read this in one sitting. There was plenty to like, even for an adult who's already forgotten a lot about being a child. While I journaled infrequently as a child, I nonetheless understood Harriet's impulse to write down and comment on everything that happened. There was this one part where Harriet was playing with her parents and then abruptly stopped to write down in her journal was was happening and how she was feeling, and then looked up to see her parents staring at her like she was an alien from outer space, concerned about how abnormal her reaction was. I felt that keenly, as a weird kid whose parents didn't understand her. Harriet sounds like she may have been on the spectrum, as she found it difficult to interact with others without her trusty notebook, kept such a strict schedule that Ole Golly would have to make sure she wasn't wearing the same thing every day, and she always had a tomato sandwich for lunch. She preferred writing to socializing, and did not like having to follow social convention. Here are two excellent    articles on the matter (I only read the first).

I also remember having a similar impulse to spy, although nowhere near to the extent that Harriet did. She actually snuck into a rich lady's house and hid in the dumbwaiter in order to spy on her! Her spying was rather privacy-violating and nosy, and her observation skills were combined with her age-typical lack of empathy. I was unsurprised when her classmates took her frank, often mean comments personally and shunned her. I did think the extent of their punishment went too far for what she actually did. When you pick up someone's journal with the word PRIVATE on the cover, you know you are transgressing by reading it, even/especially as an 11 year old. If you read something mean about yourself, I can see being mad at the author and maybe not talking to them for a week or so, but they actually made an anti-Harriet club (which lasted for weeks, atypical of children of that age) and had a parade of haterism in front of her outside of school! All of the adults were clueless, but I would have liked one of them to point out that when you read someone's diary or eavesdrop, you deserve whatever bad things you read or hear about yourself. To be honest, I'm shocked no one leaned over her shoulder to read what she was writing in class way before this, kids being what they are.

Besides her classmates, household, and the rich lady, Harriet spied on an older, cat-hoarding man and an Italian family who owned a grocery store. Harriet's rich WASP background showed itself in how she looked down on her working class subjects and found their lives and circumstances exotic. (To be fair, Harriet looked down on nearly everybody.) The family's portrayal was of course rife with stereotyping (like Harriet, Louise Fitzhugh came from an affluent WASPy background, and this book was published in the early 1960s). It didn't sit right with me that this little rich girl was spying on and judging a family who were going through things she would never go through or understand. Because her spying was done in secret, none of the adults in her life were able to tell her she was wrong for doing that.

I found Harriet and her nanny Ole Golly to be interesting characters with an familiar yet unique relationship dynamic. Plenty of well to do children have nannies in books, even stern or opinionated ones, but Harriet actually loved and respected Ole Golly. The book changes roughly halfway when Ole Golly falls in love and gets married, leaving Harriet. This sets the stage for the things that happen to Harriet, in my opinion. No one realizes that Harriet is grieving the loss of her actual parent, as Ole Golly was far more of a parent to her than her real parents were. I wasn't surprised at the leaving or moving away (Harriet was rather old to have a nanny), but Harriet and Ole Golly could have written to each other, and should have! Harriet handled this severe rupture to her schedule and life badly. Her class reading her notebook and judging her wouldn't have affected her so badly if she'd had Ole Golly to help her. She basically fell apart when that happened, claiming to be sick so she could stay home from school, lashing out, acting out in class, etc. Her parents, unused to actually parenting, freaked out and ineffectually tried to help her, even taking her to a child psychologist. A letter from Ole Golly arrives and sets Harriet straight and encourages her, and she starts to mend her relationships with her former best friends. The school decides to channel Harriet's compulsive writing by allowing her to take over the 6th grade newspaper, which seemed to be published daily? Harriet's spying and her observations on her subjects were outlined in the newspaper, which became very popular with her class.

This, to me, was unsatisfactory. Ole Golly should have given Harriet more of a heads-up that she was leaving, knowing her love of routine. She should have had a proper goodbye with Harriet, instead of telling her never to cry and then jumping in a taxi. I don't see Harriet's junior tabloid being popular with her classmates, as it was all about people they didn't know, and any school worth its salt would have read it and stopped Harriet from printing only gossip.

Also, this doesn't really fit anywhere, but as a twenty-first century educator I found it unsettling that Harriet's scientist bestie wanted to blow up the school and maybe the world (people from the early sixties would have found both the school blowing up and the girl scientist silly and extremely unlikely to happen). Harriet's other bestie was a boy who was basically the single parent to a slacker writer father. The boy budgeted, did the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc. while the father "wrote" (slept) and partied. I was livid at the level of neglect this poor child lived with.

In all, I found this an interesting book that probably would have been too weird and sad for me as a child. I think it might be helpful to slightly older children who are going through bullying at school. At least one article on the internet told me that Harriet is a well-beloved character among lesbians and queer women, due to her gender nonconforming clothes and attitude (in the 1960s girls mostly wore dresses/skirts and mary janes, not hoodies, jeans and sneakers!). You can see Harriet on the cover image above. The illustrations of the cover and in the book are by Louse Fitzhugh as well; she was a lesbian. One subplot deals with dancing school, much dreaded by Harriet and her scientist bestie, and Harriet's main beefs are with the annoying girly teacher's pets in her class. Harriet's two best friends are actually gender nonconforming as well due to their hobbies and activities (science by choice, housekeeping out of necessity).

Cover notes: I liked Fitzhugh's illustrated cover best, so I used it. My copy didn't have a cover because it was a library book, and we toss hardcover books' slipcovers in my library. Any attempts to girlify or age up Harriet on her book covers should be illegal. 

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: October 31
From: library
Format: hardcover
Status: returned