Synopsis

In this inspiring biography, discover the true story of Harriet the Spy author Louise Fitzhugh — and learn about the woman behind one of literature’s most beloved heroines.

Harriet the Spy, first published in 1964, has mesmerized generations of readers and launched a million diarists. Its beloved antiheroine, Harriet, is erratic, unsentimental, and endearing-very much like the woman who created her, Louise Fitzhugh.

Born in 1928, Fitzhugh was raised in segregated Memphis, but she soon escaped her cloistered world and headed for New York, where her expanded milieu stretched from the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village to the art world of postwar Europe, and her circle of friends included members of the avant-garde like Maurice Sendak and Lorraine Hansberry. Fitzhugh’s novels, written in an era of political defiance, are full of resistance: to authority, to conformity, and even — radically, for a children’s author — to make-believe.

As a children’s author and a lesbian, Fitzhugh was often pressured to disguise her true nature. Sometimes You Have to Lie tells the story of her hidden life and of the creation of her masterpiece, which remains long after her death as a testament to the complicated relationship between truth, secrecy, and individualism.

Note from Leslie

In 1963, when Louise Fitzhugh was thirty-five and writing Harriet the Spy, about an eleven-year-old girl who lived in New York, I was also an eleven-year-old girl who lived in New York. Harriet lived on the ritzy Upper East Side, while my family of five had migrated from the Bronx to rural Long Island, to live closer to my father’s five-acre junkyard. His business, A&B Auto Wrecking, was located across the road from the Speonk train station—and, as I would later learn, about five miles from Louise Fitzhugh’s summer home in Quogue. Speonk was the train stop for Louise’s friends visiting from the city, a three-hour trip. Ursula Nordstrom disembarked there, as did Louise’s other friends, including actors, painters, editors, and all the other glamorous denizens of her intersecting literary and artistic worlds.

Fitzhugh and I were from different sides of the tracks, but we may well have crossed paths at Mrs. D.’s diner, which served as the train station waiting room. Mrs. D. wore 1940s-style housedresses, her hair in a net, as she fried hamburgers and brewed coffee in what had once been the narrow galley kitchen of a working railroad carriage. Whenever my father took me to lunch at Mrs. D’s, I’d order an egg cream and a tomato sandwich (BLT on white bread, hold the toast, hold the bacon), a combo I believed to be entirely my own invention. Now, I think it likely Mrs. D. served the same off-menu meal to others—perhaps even to a crop-haired, petite woman dressed in paint-stained overalls who was waiting for a train.
Harriet the Spy was originally targeted for children born during the end of the Baby Boom, in other words, readers then between eight and twelve, including me. But in 1964, when the novel was published, I knew nothing of its existence, and I would not learn about it for years. In sixth grade, I had left kids’ lit behind. I preferred to read novels that seemed to last forever, like The Agony and the Ecstasy, by Irving Stone, and anything by Daphne du Maurier. I was a devoted reader of comic books and of Mad Magazine. To be honest, the most important literature in my life were the lyrics to Beatles songs.

Such was my tenuous and distant connection to Louise Fitzhugh, a state of affairs that would remain unaltered for another thirty-five years, until 1988, when I was hired to write an adaptation of Harriet the Spy for the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company. I read it through several times, stunned at how lucky I was—after all this time, and the many ways our rendezvous might have gone awry—to find her.

Follow the timeline of Louise’s life

Visual Biography

Review

I was intrigued by this book because while I have heard of Harriet the Spy, I have never read the book. I always love learning about authors and what their life was like and how they came to create their famous works and I now want to read the book that helped girls realize that they do not have to fit into a mold of what society thinks they should do and be in life.

Louise Fitzhugh led an interesting life and I felt like she never quite figured out where she fit in, or if she fit in at all. Her family appeared to be dysfunctional, but then what family isn’t today? Louise liked to have fun and didn’t let anyone bring her down, or at least that is my impression. She had dreams of what she wanted for her life, and it wasn’t to live in Tennessee. Rather, New York and Paris were two locations that called to her.

This book is very detailed about Louise, her writing, her art, and her family. There is a section that shares how her parents met and their relationship, however brief, and how that impacted Louise growing up. I felt that the book was well researched with all of the footnotes. Most of the information came from family and friends since Louise rarely gave interviews, but I felt like the details gave us an insight into her travels through life and love.

This is not a quick read and sometimes I felt like there was too much information, but I can imagine it was hard to know what to keep and what to leave out.

Overall we give it 3 paws up.

About the Author

Leslie Brody is a creative writing professor and well-regarded biographer known for revealing the stories of delightfully complicated feminists in modern history. The San Francisco Chronicle praised Irrepressible (Counterpoint Press, 2010)—her biography of Jessica Mitford—saying, “Brody has made the world a better place by telling her saga so skillfully.” And Maya Angelou stated, “Leslie Brody reintroduced me to a friend I loved so dearly; told me stories about events I did not participate in, and it makes me jealous. Thank you for the book.” Her new book, Sometimes You Have to Lie, is the biography of Louise Fitzhugh, author of the groundbreaking children’s novel, Harriet the Spy. Brody reveals Louise Fitzhugh was every bit as complex, radical, and trailblazing as her beloved heroine.

Born in the Bronx, Brody left home at the age of 17 to become an underground press reporter in Berkeley, CA. After graduating from San Francisco State University, she became immersed in the theater and served as a playwright-in-residence at various theaters in San Francisco and Minneapolis, as well as a librettist for new work associated with both the Minnesota Opera and the Philadelphia Opera. She then returned to journalism, first as a contributing book editor for the Hungry Mind Review and then as a book columnist for Elle magazine.

In addition to her works of biography, Leslie Brody has written a memoir, Red Star Sister (Hungry Mind Press, 1998), which received the PEN Center USA West Award; and co-authored a book of essays with Gary Amdahl, entitled A Motel of the Mind (Philos Press, 2002).

She has held International Writing Fellowships at Hawthornden in Scotland (2004) and the Camargo Foundation (2005) in France. In the U.S. she’s been an artist-in-residence/fellow at the McDowell Colony, Centrum, Yaddo, Red Cinder Colony, Ragdale, and the Virginia Center for the Arts. She received her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. Since 1998, she has taught Creative Nonfiction in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Redlands.

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