Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have to Lie is the second biography we have of Louise Fitzhugh, the author of the beloved children’s novel Harriet the Spy. The other appeared in 1995 to little fanfare. Its author was the intriguingly named Virginia L. Wolf, a writer whose only other published book is a reading companion to Little House on the Prairie. The lack of public information on Fitzhugh is a bit confounding, not least because her claim to fame is a novel about collecting as much information on people as possible. Published in 1964, Harriet the Spy followed the adventures of Harriet M. Welsch, a little girl who enjoys a carefree life of snooping on her Manhattan neighbors and eating bland sandwiches until, one day, the jig is up, and the notebook she’s been writing her astute but cruel observations in is discovered by her classmates and friends.
It turns out that Fitzhugh intimately knew the dangers of having your cover blown. As a lesbian writing children’s literature in the aftermath of the McCarthy era, she guarded her privacy by necessity. Despite her book’s extraordinary success, Fitzhugh gave no interviews, did no readings at children’s bookstores, and generally refused to participate in Harper’s publicity campaign. She was motivated in part by a bohemian, countercultural disgust with the book marketing game, but the political climate at the time was certainly another factor. “For Louise, exposure could have caused real trouble,” Brody writes. “Not just for herself, but also for her agent, editor, and publisher, all of whom might be publicly hounded, censored, and boycotted.”
When Fitzhugh tried to follow up Harriet the Spy with a novel that centered on a lesbian relationship, her agent (who herself was bisexual) was said to be “quite terrified” by the material and worried about the public’s reaction, given her client’s reputation as an author of books for children. The manuscript, titled Mimi, never made it to publication.
In Sometimes You Have to Lie, Brody explores these hidden corners of the celebrated author’s life, crafting a personal and political biography of Fitzhugh that situates her popular children’s novel in the context of the homophobia and conformity of the postwar era. The result is a study that reveals the quiet subversiveness of Harriet the Spy and adds sharp political potency to the book’s seemingly innocent play with questions of secrecy and surveillance.