Throwback Thursday: Harriet the Spy
Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy was one of my favorite books, once, though I think of it seldom now. I thought of it a few years ago when they made a movie that bore no resemblance to the original story, and again when I saw, and subsequently purchased, a copy in a used bookstore not long ago. Neither occasion, however, has effectively motivated me to read it again.
I think I’m afraid of ruining it. Harriet the Spy was so important to me once, and it can be so hard to go back to things that used to matter. I don’t want to look at Harriet, the way I have looked at so many other protagonists from my childhood, and feel disappointed by what I see. Maybe I’ll never reread the book. Maybe I’ll let myself remember it always as something particularly special. Or maybe I’ll read it, and find it genuinely special again, but I’m not sure I can afford to risk it. Too many of my early heroes have lost my respect in the Great Reread of 2015, and I need someone to cling to. Harriet, I think, will do quite nicely.
It’s not as if I’m remembering some flawless, ideal form of Harriet to cling to. Mostly, I remember her being a busybody and a brat who couldn’t admit when she’d made a mistake. But I liked her. And I certainly pitied her. Kids, especially fictional ones, can act so mean.
This is a story of loneliness. Harriet spends the beginning of the book recording everything she sees in little green notebooks. She is filling the fourteenth, I believe, when the story starts. Admittedly, many of Harriet’s recordings are somewhat unethical. She sees most of what she writes from other people’s balconies, windows, and dumbwaiters. This is how she antagonizes all of her friends — by finding and recording all of their deepest secrets.
As a shy, quiet, and often isolated person myself, I saw Harriet’s spying as an attempt to connect with people. With strangers, she tried to make herself a part of their lives in the only way she knew how. With her friends, she simply wanted to get even closer to them. It’s hard, sometimes, to get to know people, and it’s hard to feel comfortable around people you don’t know. The solution, obviously, at least when you’re in third or fourth grade, is to find out everything about everybody.
Eventually it all backfires, and she ends up with no friends at all because they’re all understandably upset about both the invasion of privacy and Harriet’s harsh judgments of what she’s seen. Harriet spends most of the book struggling to figure out what went wrong, and then struggling even more to rebuild relationships. In the end, she realizes that it’s always better to connect with people the hard way.
The hard way is hard, though. It involves so much talking, and trying to find the right words to say, as well as the right way to say them. You’re always worrying that you’ll make one wrong move because you don’t know people well enough, and then the whole thing will be ruined, and you’ll never get the chance to know them better.
I couldn’t even begin to connect with most people in elementary school. I needed this book so much, because as awful as she was, I understood Harriet, and I always thought she might understand me, too, once she got past her judgmental, busybody phase. It can seem hard to find your insecurities in fiction. So Harriet will always mean a lot to me. I love rereading books, but the middle grade books that really, really mattered always make me nervous, because they weren’t made with my current reading level in mind, and sometimes they’re just not as well written as I remembered — great for eight year olds, but disappointing at twenty one. And of course, there’s always the chance that ten plus years of fond memories have distorted the details, and the characters that I think I love now never existed in this book at all.
Harriet was the one who never knew what to say, the one who could never hold on to the right kinds of friends, the one who was supposed to be smart, but just messed up again and again and again. I’m not sure I’ve even outgrown those things yet. I need Harriet. I need her to be exactly the way I remember her being. A lot of the things that I can’t help feel more okay because I have them in common with her.
