Tremendously influential when I was an angry, isolated early teen

Mental note: update review.

I read this when I was about ten. As I remember, I enjoyed it; I was reminded of the series by an NYT article about Louise Fitzhugh.

I suspect all of us on Goodreads have that handful of children’s classics we somehow missed in childhood. It’s strange to read them for the first time as an adult- strange, because they’re wholly unfamiliar to us, whereas our friends grew up with them memorized. And while reading an old childhood favourite in adulthood brings you back to your child self, reading a children’s book for the first time as an adult is a totally different experience. Such it is with Harriet the Spy and I.

Maybe it’s just been too long since I read children’s lit, or maybe it’s been too long since I was a child (I am precisely twice Harriet's age), but man. This book is weird. It’s like talking to someone who’s on a low dose of hallucinogens. They’re present and coherent but they’re making some strange connections. You’re totally on board with those connections, because they’re hilarious and make sense in a messed up way, but they’re not connections you, or any sober person, would make. Yeah?

Finally, we need to talk about the fact that Louise Fitzhugh was taking the absolute mickey out of us. If I hadn’t already read she was a lesbian, I would have been CERTAIN of it based on the following amazing, wonderful, unforgettable quote:

"There is more to this thing of love than meets the eye...but if it makes you like to eat all kinds of wurst I'm not sure I'm going to like this."

Harriet, girl. SAME. Okay? SAME.

I truly enjoyed Harriet the Spy but I'm not so sure my children would. I don't think I'll recommend it to my ten-year-old. I'm sure she would love Harriet's tenacity and honesty but I think she'd have a hard time with how mean Harriet can be to her friends and classmates. She'd probably have to put the book down when the notebook is found. Social awkwardness!! I really struggled with how often Harriet comments on people's size. I know it's almost fifty years old but the fat shaming was a lot.

Harriet observes the world around her and documents everything she sees in her notebook. She spies on a range of people in her life and takes copious notes about the good, the bad, and the terribly boring. She keeps tabs on her neighbors including the wealthy woman in her apartment building who lies in bed all day talking on the phone, the loud family that owns the corner grocery store--and her friends. Harriet doesn’t hold back in her notebooks, and she gets into big trouble with her classmates when they read some of the more uncharitable lines she has written about them.

Over the course of the novel, Harriet learns some tough lessons about how to balance her candid take on the world with her need for friendship. Though Harriet the Spy was published in the 1960s, the novel will still appeal to readers today, especially those who like a laugh and anyone trying to figure out how to be honest while maintaining friendships. Not a bad lesson for the Facebook generation.

This rich asshole kid named Harriet goes around stalking her neighbors and eavesdropping, writing down their conversations and secrets in notebook. She justifies this behavior because she wants to be a spy and wants to “know everything in the world,” fine. Only Harriet the asshole doesn’t write down true things, she writes down opinions of other people. She writes mean things about her friends, neighbors, and family, saying her best friend (who wants to be a scientist) is too stupid to be a scientist, and that her classmates’ parents don’t really love them. When the asshole’s nurse finds a boyfriend, she thinks and writes nasty things about him for taking the nurse away from her. I say good riddance. The nurse was the only person the asshole would listen to and gave horrible advice like “Lie to people and continue making asshole remarks about them, just make sure to do it behind their backs.” The nurse even sends the asshole a letter telling her “Don’t miss me, because I don’t miss you.” Nice.

Well her classmates find her notebook where she writes down all her asshole thoughts and of course they shun her. They unite in a club against the asshole. So naturally the asshole acts out. She slaps people, cuts their hair, throws temper tantrums, and treats the family’s working-class cook like garbage. Is she punished or taught a lesson at least? No. Instead she gets to be editor of the school paper where she writes lies about the working-class neighbors she was spying on and how they’re all stupid and go to PUBLIC SCHOOL (Gasp!). Then she tells everyone that her notebook was actually full of lies (Even though in her heart she knows they are her real opinions) and her friends forgive her.

Am I missing something here?

Read this every October for a long time.

When you talk about books that you read in your childhood most of the time you don't remember the story. You don't remember all of the characters. You don't remember how long it took you to finish it.

But what you do remember is probably the most precious gift of discovering literature as a child. The story lifted you beyond the gravitational pull of this earth and delivered you to some place else. You couldn't wait to go. You wanted to read under the bed covers in the middle of the night, on the playground at recess, sitting under oak trees in the backyard, laying in the field under cloudy skies, in the bath tub...everywhere and all the time!

One good reading experience made you hungry for the next. Sometimes a book was so good, you just wanted to read it over and over again.

I don't remember anything about the book, Harriet the Spy, except that I absolutely loved it. I carried it to all my secret places for months on end, and read it so many times from beginning to end until it began to fall apart.

I have a lot of books like that from my childhood, books that were loved so much that they eventually required the taping and gluing of covers and pages to remain intact. Although the storylines cannot be recalled accurately, none of that matters to me. These books rate high with me, because I remember how I felt when read them: that reading was more than just something to do, it was a discovery.

Since naming my youngest Harriet, I've had a number of people ask me or just outright assume that I named her for the title character from Louise Fitzhugh's novel Harriet the Spy (1964). She isn't named for the book but she did prompt me to read the book.

Many of the books reviews I've read for Harriet the Spy credit it for being ground breaking its brutally honest portrayal of childhood. Maybe it's the first (or among the first) to depict children in then contemporary society. The book though was noteworthy enough to win the Sequoyah Book Award.

I wish I could say I liked the book, but frankly, I didn't. Harriet is an unlikable and unreliable protagonist. She is left in the care of everyone except her ever absent parents who only actively take part in her life when everyone else has given up. She is first in the care of a governess, Catherine, though always called by Harriet's nickname, Ole Golly. She is later left in the hands of the less than sympathetic cook. Her parents are only ever there to be off to parties or to be overheard arguing.

Harriet meanwhile is given free reign to spy on her friends and neighbors. She's filled up 14 note books since her 8th birthday (she's 11 in the book). When she's finally caught spying her compulsive need to write in her note books becomes rather scary to read. Before her parents even try to talk to her, she's sent to therapy.

Harriet's tragic year seems to be more a scathing look at the wealthy rather than childhood in general. Maybe that's what makes Harriet so unusual. Most YA books seem to children from blue collar families.

book has not aged well, in my opinion.
didn't really enjoy. I don't think my children would be interested.
read + watched movie with #middlegradegroupies spin-off group
inspired by references in The Midnight Children.

What a CHARACTER. I loved this book so much more as an adult than I did as a kid. I remember being very disoriented by Harriet's life and environment -- "Ole Golly"? what kind of character would be named "Ole Golly"? -- it seemed very unreal. That may be explained by the comic realism but also the fact of Harriet's riverside home in upper Manhattan with cook and nanny and being able to walk around spying into apartment buildings being far from my own rural/small town life in central Virginia, so I understand why this novel didn't hit home for me the way it did for so many people I know. Extremely rewarding revisitation.

Okay, who’s ready for another dose of nostalgia? I remember picking up this book before a summer vacation. The trailer had premiered earlier and I was dying to know what happened before I saw the movie (All the readers who truly feel me, throw your hands up at me). My plan was to read a chapter a day, but I was also reading Ralph S. Mouse at the same time (nostalgia kicking in yet?).

Anyway, somehow my older brother got ahold of it and finished it before me while I was reading the other book during this vacation. And he spoiled it. Yeah guys, he was mad because he got scammed because he bought a bootleg version of Dangerous Minds off the street (we were visiting family in New York at the time) so he took his frustration out that way as typical older brothers in the 90’s did for some reason. If you don’t understand this, I’m sure  Clarissa would be more than happy to explain everything about sibling dynamics to you…

Moving forward, I didn’t finish the book at the time because I was mad that it was spoiled for me (no worries, I did pick it up again a while later). But I did see the movie and it was spectacular. I was obsessed with Harriet’s use of everyday things and how she turned them into spy gadgets. I wanted a belt like hers, and I think Wild Planet capitalized on it with their own line of spy toys.


I even remember prizes at our elementary school fundraiser being these collapsible binoculars and sunglasses with mirrors on the side of them so you could see behind you. These cheapo toys made all of us kids feel like real secret agents on the playground.


Then the movie came out on VHS and the clamshell packaging was orange! You guys, that was crazy at the time. Even the tape was orange instead of the pedestrian black, and that was so wild. And it came with invisible ink pens.


A big component of the story was that Harriet was told by her nanny Golly that if she wanted to be a writer that she needed to practice writing everyday, and to start using her powers of inspection to really see people. To look beneath the obviousness of their actions and see the underlying causes. And Harriet gets in trouble for her acerbic and cutting observations when her (private) journal is stolen and all the kids in her class find out what she really sees when she looks at them. She becomes a pariah for this, and even her closest friends give in to the pressure of alienating her because they felt betrayed by her (again: PRIVATE) thoughts. Feeling isolated and that her personal property was violated, she lashes out at everyone, using her newfound detective paradigm to see everyone’s weaknesses.  This was kind of mind-blowing as a kid. That you could shut people down with just a few simple comments; today we call that “slaying”.  And girl gets her revenge, no lie. But that’s part of the lesson here: you can really damage people when you know where they hurt, because the truth really can cut deep. Eventually, it’s up to Harriet to see that she went too far; that she allowed everyone turning on her because of her (PRIVATE!!!!) thoughts to have power over her and that she fed into the animosity to just make things worse; and put a stop to this. At last she rises above things, owns up to her part , and apologizes which brings her friends around once again, but this time with a healthy respect about not messing with a clever girl.