notebooks full of secrets
Harriet M. Welsch lives in New York City and wants to be a writer. To prepare herself to be a writer, she observes as much as she can, writing it all down in her notebooks. She has a daily schedule she sticks to. After school, she comes home to have her cake and milk while her caregiver Ole Golly has tea. Then Harriet goes to the same places to spy on the same people.
There is an older man who has an entire room full of cats. There is a couple who acquire new art and then invite people over to see it. There is a family who owns a grocery store. Lately she’s also started keeping an eye on an older woman who rarely leaves her bed. That one is risky, as Harriet has to go inside her house and pull herself up to the woman’s bedroom in the dumbwaiter that occasionally squeaks. This is the only stop on her spy route where she can’t find out what’s going on from outside, and sometimes she skips it, because it’s very risky.
Some days, Harriet will stop by to see one of her best friends. Sport lives with his father, who is a writer. Sport does a lot of the cooking and shopping for them, so he’s pretty responsible for a kid. Janie wants to be a scientist, and she is usually in her room after school, doing experiments and sometimes making chemical combinations that make loud noises, just to scare her mother. Especially when her mother is talking about make her take dance lessons. Janie does not want dance lessons. Neither does Harriet, who hopes her mother doesn’t come up with the same idea.
But one day, things started to change at home. Harriet saw Ole Golly coming home with a friend who was a man. And the next time Harriet’s parents went out for dinner, Ole Golly and her boyfriend took Harriet out for dinner and a movie. When her parents got home first and couldn’t find Harriet and Ole Golly, they were quite upset. The next day, it was decided that Harriet no longer needed Ole Golly to look after her. And Ole Golly wanted to leave, to get married, and told Harriet it was time.
Harriet did her best to be okay with the change, but then she left her notebook at school in a place where the other kids could see it. And they read it all. All the things that Harriet had written, things that shouldn’t be said out loud, were on display for all the kids in her class to see. Even Sport and Janie were mad at her. Harriet’s first thought was to go home sick, and she did. But eventually she had to face their anger and find a way to make amends to her classmates. And she had to do it without Ole Golly.
As Harriet learns more about herself and her relationships with others, she has to think back to the lessons Ole Golly taught her and reach down to her wounded pride and find a way to apologize and make things right to her friends and classmates.
Harriet the Spy is a classic of children’s literature, an honest look at learning social intelligence and dealing with grief. Author Louise Fitzhugh wrote this subversive novel for kids in the 1960s, when the entire country was dealing with resistance to authority and paradigm shifts.
I loved this book when I was a kid. I also had issues with social intelligence, so I understood this character pretty well. Rereading this now, 50 years after its original publication, I can’t help but wonder if today’s Harriet would be diagnosed with some version of neurodivergence. But with or without that, Harriet is honest and strong as an individual, and while she has some trouble dealing with the loss of Ole Golly, I still feel for her and her struggles with the coldness of reality. I know not everyone will be able to understand or enjoy the time spent with Harriet, but I think anyone who is having trouble finding their place in school or in their own family may find her a sympathetic antihero to root for.
