“I want to know everything, everything,” screeched Harriet suddenly, lying back and bouncing up and down on the bed. “Everything in the world, everything, everything. I will be a spy and know everything.” 

[Ole Golly said,] “It won’t do you a bit of good to know everything if you don’t do anything with it. Now get up, Miss Harriet the Spy, you’re going to sleep now.”

Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy is a novel about a young girl who wants to be a writer — or maybe a spy. She constantly writes her candid observations about other people in her private notebook, and she is given love and attention by her nurse, Ole Golly. But what would happen if Ole Golly were to leave? Or if her notebook got into the hands of her classmates, and they read her unfiltered thoughts about them? Suzanne and Chris reconnect with a book that meant a great deal to them as children, appreciating its careful and striking construction, and teasing out the queerness in the book.

SHOW NOTES.

Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet the Spy. [Bookshop.]

Other books by Louise Fitzhugh: The Long Secret. Nobody’s Familiy Is Going to Change. Sport.

Sandra Scoppettone: Suzuki Beane.

Leslie Brody: Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy. (An excerpt.)

Our episodes on other children’s books: Little Women. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlotte’s Web.

Our episode on Invisible Man.

Next episode: J.R.R. Tolkien: The Two Towers. [Bookshop.]

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