Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I was an extreme bookworm as a kid. I also lived a good fifteen minute drive from the closest library, and my mother wasn’t the sort to go to the library every week, which meant that I read a goodly portion of the novels we owned multiple times. (Except Gone With the Wind. I spent a significant bit of one summer reading that, but believe me, once was enough.) I reread the books I loved (the Anne books, much of Louisa May Alcott’s children’s fiction, A Little Princess, The Lord of the Rings) and the books I mostly really enjoyed (The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn, Black Beauty, my brother’s Black Stallion books); I also read library books, random books acquired from used bookstores, borrowed books, and whatever I felt most in the mood for that was on hand at the time. I even–because I was a fast reader, and I had a quiet childhood, and I didn’t start to get sick reading in the car until I had graduated from high school–read books more than once that I wasn’t that into, just because they were there.

One of those books was Harriet the Spy.

I have a memory of the copy we had having belonged to my mother, although I’m not sure now that that makes sense. It had a blond, stocky, androgynous kid in a red hoodie on the cover, and since it was one of those books that people talked about as being so good–and we owned it, so it was readily available–I read it multiple times. Every time I did, I came away wanting to like it more than I did, but hey, I was a kid, right? And because there are books I completely appreciate now that I didn’t appreciate as a kid, I decided (a month or three ago) to listen to it as an adult, to see what I thought of it now

I still don’t particularly like it.

To be fair, I did find some of the bits I’d completely forgotten about to be entertaining. The parts I vaguely remembered as not liking, however, I mostly still didn’t like, and other parts I’d forgotten about were downright exasperating. Harriet isn’t extraordinarily likeable, although she’s more so if you think of her as on the autism spectrum. I remembered Ole Golly to be more likeable than my adult self found her to be, and her exit from Harriet’s life is far more abrupt (somewhat arbitrary?) than I’d recalled. What really bothers me, however, is that the whole premise is just–wrong. As a spy, and then as the–if I recall correctly–editor of the school paper, Harriet is actually a dismal failure–and no one acknowledges it. No one ever, EVER makes the point that Harriet isn’t writing down facts at all. She’s writing down her opinion of what she sees, as well as frequently speculating based on her opinion, with no effort to self-regulate or fact check. When she’s playing at being a spy, of course, that’s sort of her business, although the kind of person we’re meant to see Ole Golly as would almost certainly have made that point to Harriet multiple times. When she’s writing her speculations in a school publication, however–it boggles the mind. How did no one complain about what she wrote?

It did occur to me that–given what I read about Louise Fitzhugh when determining if I cared about the sequels, which I don’t–she may have been intentionally rebelling against the expectation, for girls, to always be “nice”. My parents were married the year after Harriet was originally published, and my mother was certainly raised to be gracious and tactful, rather than blunt and tactless. Gracious and tactful, however, can easily become (and did in my mother’s case) distinctly passive-aggressive, and if that’s the point Fitzhugh was trying to make, I agree that it’s a point that deserves to be made. Her book, however, fails to make it. Honesty absolutely matters, but true honesty–which sees the good as well as the bad. Harriet doesn’t write down anything positive about ANYONE, as far as I can tell. Her speculations are all negative, to some degree, and although one assumes she sees good things around her OCCASIONALLY, she doesn’t write about them. Harriet isn’t nice, certainly, but she also isn’t honest; she’s negative and self-absorbed.

For those of you who may love the book–well, you do you. (Some of you also probably think Scarlet O’Hara is a role model for girls.) For those of you who haven’t read it and might be considering it–I’d say don’t waste your time.