Why I Love Harriet the Spy
She’s pretty much been my role model in life.
Hard as it is for me to believe, Harriet the Spy is over 50 years old. (Maybe I just don’t want to accept that I’m not too far from that particular milestone myself.)
I’m not sure if I can fully express how much I loved this book when I was a kid. A chubby, bespectacled girl who liked to write snarky things? Harriet M. Welsch was more than just a fictional character for me; I think she was a life model.
I spent my first few years in a Manhattan environment very similar to Harriet’s, and her surroundings felt like home to me. I never lived in a house with a dumbwaiter, but I knew what they were. (Never occurred to me to try to hide in one, though.)
While I tried to be Harriet when I was a fifth grader without a lot of real-life friends, I mostly lacked her nerve. I popped the lenses out of a pair of bright blue kiddie sunglasses and wore them like they were real glasses, Harriet-style, but my parents told me they looked ridiculous and made me stop it. (I got to wear real glasses soon enough, alas.) My spy route was mostly whatever I could see if I looked out my bedroom window on a slow afternoon.
And I was not about to take my spy notebook out in public where anyone could possibly discover it. That awful, horrifying scene from the book when Harriet’s friends find her notebook and see all the mean, petty things she’s been writing about them is still hard for me to read.
Something else about the book that made an impression on me back then and has influenced my reading preferences to this day: Harriet is far from a nice kid. She can be a bratty, mean little shit for no reason at all, and that made her relatable to me. To this day, I’ll take a flawed heroine over a perfect angel.
The book also does an excellent job of capturing how weird it is when you’re a kid and you realize for the first time that the grownups around you have lives of their own, that they did not come into existence at the same time you did, and that their worlds don’t revolve entirely around you.
And one of the last lines of the book—and arguably part of its underlying message—is Sometimes you have to lie. Whoa. That message in a book for children seems positively anarchic.
But it’s those very things about the book—the bratty kids and the utterly unsentimental messages about childhood and how to survive it — that make it so enjoyable and enduring.
I also remember feeling dejected the first time I read the author bio and learned that Louise Fitzhugh had died not long after the book was published. That made me feel like something about Harriet herself was lost.
I like the book’s first sequel The Long Secret, in which Harriet takes a supporting role to her mousy, quiet friend Beth Ellen. While Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret gets most of the attention when it comes to books about preteen girls grappling with their first periods and the role of religion in their lives, I think The Long Secret handles those topics almost as well, albeit from a more Christian-centric worldview. The rest of the Harriet sequels and spinoffs didn’t do much for me; neither did the Nickelodeonized mid-90s film.
Whenever someone asks what books from my childhood stayed with me and influenced me, I tend to give more intellectual-sounding answers like To Kill A Mockingbird. But if I’m being completely honest, Harriet the Spy wins that question hands down.
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