April 4, 2023
On Choosing Harriet
As I’ve talked about many times—it was a formative experience that would inspire both my first novel and the name of my firstborn child—I didn’t read HARRIET THE SPY until I was 27, which I’ve always known was a blessing. Although I’d been a fan of Louise Fitzhugh’s slightly less bizarre (but only slightly) sequel THE LONG SECRET, which I read regularly throughout my childhood, tracing my fingers along the lines on the map that opened its pages. It’s a weird book, but not as weird as the Fitzhugh O.G., whose charms would have washed right over me as a young reader too firmly wedded to conventionality.
It wasn’t until that I was almost 30 that I was ready to receive its message about telling the truth, and being unlikable, and being brave, and true to oneself. When I was 27 and finally coming of age in a way that was real to my bones, HARRIET THE SPY read like a revelation.
At almost 30, I wanted to be like Harriet—that courage, that gumption, no fucks to give. And I wanted the same for my child, my daughter, who was born two years later, whom I named Harriet, imagining—the same mistake I’ve made in parenthood over and over—that she could be fully hatched as such, that I might have learned all my lessons so that she wouldn’t have to.
Last night I finished reading Harriet the Spy again, aloud to my family, the second or third time I’ve read the novel with my children, but the first time since they were old enough to critique it—they’re weeks away from turning 10 and 14. And this is the closest I’ll ever come to reading it as a child myself, because I was reading it through their impressions of the novel, and—just as I would have done if I were 10 and 14—they found the whole thing unfathomably weird.
And I did too, which I don’t remember so much from when I was 27. The unevenness of its structure. The writing is kind of sloppy in places. Why does Pinky Whitehead have the same last name as the head teacher? Someone “gasps audibly,” which, as any editor will tell you, is the only way to gasp, right? Harriet M. Welsch, I can see now in a way I didn’t have the vocabulary for 15 years ago, clearly (and wonderfully!) exists on the autism spectrum. And oh my goodness, she struggles so much, which I see now as I read like as a mother. She’s not badass, she’s tortured. She’s hurt and confused and railing against a mold into which she doesn’t fit. At age 27, I admired her obstinacy, but now I read her and think, “Oh, man! That must be so hard!”
And what a complicated legacy that is to hand to your child—how I see that now. When our children are hypothetical, of course, we dream that they will be strong, and defiant, demand tomato sandwiches. Who’d want a child who was like everybody else, prissy and obnoxious like Marion Hawthorne or Rachel Hennessy? Fitting in to the point where one’s character gets lost, and they’re just part of the crowd. Who’d want a kid who never gets in trouble, or ruffles feathers, or who gets along with everyone? Who wouldn’t want a daughter like Harriet?
But now, nearly fourteen years into parenthood, I see that these questions—in practice—have answers far more complicated than I thought they were when I first asked them. I see how we imagine our children will be brave and bold—and they have to be!—but how difficult it is to be so. How we imagine our children will be strong individuals, and raise them not to follow the crowd, to be like everybody else, but how painful it feels when they don’t fit in. How we (okay, maybe I’m talking about ME) bring all our own painful childhood struggles and experiences to the table, projecting them onto whatever our kids are going through, so that we’re all just mired in emotions and projections (and sometimes it’s difficult to tell where they end and we begin). How we might name our child Harriet and then reread the book and realize that this is an awful lot to carry in a way we really didn’t get at the time.
My particular Harriet, at the moment, is in a pretty good place—though I’ve knocked wood just now, because I’m afraid that I’ll jinx it. (In parenthood, nothing ever stays the same for a moment, which is a blessing when things are hard, but can be a curse when things are otherwise.) But oh, there have been tough times as she’s been finding her way and growing into herself, and there were times I wished for the ease of a Rachel or Marion, for her to be a kid who knew the script and could recite it flawlessly.
I had no idea what I was signing up for all those years ago when I chose her name out of a book.
But I suppose that’s the case no matter what your child’s name is.
