#30: Harriet the Spy and the Anger of Kids

30 april 2021

am in the middle of a great Louise Fitzhugh re-read--so far, Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret--in preparation for reading her new biography, Sometimes You Have to Lie. I remember reading Harriet as a kid (and maybe The Long Secret, too? the line "I wouldn't go to the corner with Zeeny," sticks in my head). I don't remember very clearly what my reaction to it was--it wasn't one of the books like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or Ella Enchanted that I read over and over again for comfort (I would also like to note here that I hate every single one of these new covers, please simply reissue books with original covers). I remember liking Harriet--what bookish, aspiring-writer child wouldn't feel extremely seen by a protagonist who writes everything in a notebook compulsively and keeps mean-ish, candid notes on her classmates and neighbors? But there was something about Harriet that I think was uncomfortable to me as a child, something difficult to look at directly when you're trying as hard as you can to be sweet, and accommodating and not a disappointment to your parents.

I spent a lot of my childhood feeling really, fundamentally out-of-place. We were among the few families at our elementary school that were in any way conservatively religious, and so I was left out of a number of the things it felt like everyone else was doing--Pokemon, Harry Potter, Halloween, staying up past 7:30. I also grew up in a white, wealthy suburb of Boston, and, other than the few Black children who were, no joke, bussed in from Boston proper, I was one of the few children of color. We were allowed to roam mostly-wild in the neighborhood, riding our bikes around a good mile of suburban streets and no farther, hemmed in by big streets and neighbors' watchful eyes, ready to call my mom.

All of this to say I was both very privileged and lucky in a lot of ways but also very frequently an angry, alienated, kind of sneaky little kid, who wanted desperately to just be allowed to be literally anyone other than myself, to be "normal" with the 8:30 bedtime and green eyes and knowledge of my Harry Potter house that came along with it. I felt like I had to lie to my parents all the time about who I was and what I wanted to do and the things I found interesting, and I felt like I had to lie to my classmates all the time about the exact same things.

I embarked on this re-reading thanks to Sarah Blackwood's amazing review of the new biography in the New York Review of Books, which I've now itself read 3 or 4 times. In it, she argues that Harriet and The Long Secret are both joined by being chronicles of "the experience of young girls who can't figure out how to communicate their inner life."


A lot of the stories I liked as a kid--and I'm going to use Mixed-Up Files here as a shorthand because it feels...kin to Harriet in some pretty specific ways around the 60s/70s and alienation and New York and having scrawly little pen and ink illustrations--a lot of these stories had this same kind of alienation that I was feeling, but it was always articulated and resolved. In Mixed-Up Files, Claudia realizes and makes clear to herself 1) that she is feeling under-appreciated 2) that she needs to have An Experience and also make her family miss her a little bit 3) that she is not good enough with her pocket money to get this done on her own. And then she goes and solves all of this by, admittedly, bringing her little-kid-wealthy-cardshark-brother along with her and pulling the coolest heist in kidlit history and spending nights at the Met and bathing in the fountain etc. etc. etc. And in the end, something about Claudia is different: she's able to return to her humdrum Connecticut life with a secret, she gets to have the thing that's going to enable her to survive the rest of her stupid boring childhood. This book is so good at identifying all the ways that kids feel oppressed and hemmed in, and also how cool and resourceful and interesting kids are, and gives Claudia especially the kind of depth and emotional conflict that feels incredibly resonant even as an adult.

I remember feeling, well into my college years, that there was no way that my parents and I would ever see eye-to-eye about anything, I remember feeling like I would have to lie to them forever, that my true self would always be a vaguely sinful disappointment. I think really internalizing the message Old Golly gives Harriet at the end of the book ("1. You have to apologize. 2. You have to lie.") would have been horrifying. It would have been confirmation that this was just...what childhood was, that there actually wasn't a way out of continually butting heads with your family, of feeling out-of-sorts and misunderstood, that there was no way of just getting and being what you wanted. So instead, I read about amazing, heroic Claudia Kincaid who could articulate all her problems clearly to herself and could actually solve them in a way that was ultimately entirely fulfilling. The whole of her issue, her entire dissatisfaction, is resolved by the end of the book, she is changed and she is better. Harriet doesn't give you this kind of total satisfaction: the way to get by in this world is to apologize, and to sneak around, and the only way to be your whole self is to hide it.

This is the same kind of conclusion Blackwood reaches in her essay: "Yet the best thing about Harriet the Spy is how Harriet remains fundamentally unchanged from start to finish." Blackwood paints this as a relief but I know for me, as a child, where my own childishness and powerlessness felt neverending, this was also awful. I didn't enjoy lying, or being angry, or feeling misunderstood, but I also felt like I owed my parents, my teachers, a certain version of goodness, of placidity and docility, and so I lied. I lied a lot, constantly, nearly compulsively, but I always did so because I never felt like I had a choice to do otherwise. I think as a child, this is the reading of Blackwood's that would have stayed with me: "The novel feels less like an attempt to do something than a document of survival."

I get along really well with my parents now. They see me as a full adult person, I don't lie to them very often anymore, in part because I don't get in trouble, or even in much judgement, for telling the truth anymore. I can't really identify when that switch flipped, and I don't remember when I stopped being angry at them, but it was probably somewhere in my early-to-mid 20s. I also don't want to portray my childhood as a mass of seething rage--there was also a lot of happiness, and a lot of catering to my weird, nerdy tastes, a lot of handholding me through my Big Feelings in a way that was careful and kind--but looking back, anger and alienation were defining characteristics that I don't think I could have named as such at the time. I couldn't have predicted that we would end up here--my husband comments that the version of my parents that he's met is far from the version my siblings and I have described to him from growing up--but I'm incredibly glad we did. Harriet the Spy, and Blackwood's essay, in particular, let me reframe all the lies and subterfuge and anger as a means and mechanism of survival.

To be clear, my childhood, and the particular kind of hemmed-in-ness I had was not something that was going to kill me. I also don't know in the end that my dreams for myself and the dreams my parents had for me were all that different so I don't think I can argue that I prevented even some kind of essential part of myself from being killed off, but I do think at the time these fights and anger and this disappointment felt like these cataclysmic battles for my soul. The gift of reading Harriet, especially as an adult, is that there's some comfort in knowing that someone else--a queer, lovely adult bohemian woman rattling around Greenwich Village--saw me, somehow, in my weird anger and terror and loneliness and recognized it as a maybe inherent part of being a real, messy, child, and her advice was to apologize, and to lie, and to stick to your horrible, selfish little guns because somewhere in that anger is who you'll turn out to be, and you have a right, even as a horrible, selfish little kid, to become that person.