Happy Birthday to Harriet

Last week marked the 50^th year since the release of Harriet the Spy, the groundbreaking novel by Louise Fitzhugh.

Here’s an article about it in Publisher’s Weekly: http://publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-book-news/article/61119-harriet-the-spy-celebrates-50-years-of-sleuthing.html

When I first read Harriet the Spy, I was about nine.  For the first time, I recognized myself in print.  I didn’t look like Harriet (although I appreciated that she chose to wear glasses, a condition foisted on me by virtue of bad eyes), and I lived not in Manhattan but in Berkeley, California, which struck me at the time as woefully pedestrian.    I went to a rather large public school, my father was a surgeon, and no one in my neck of the woods had either nannies or cooks.  I did not have a Sport or a Janie in my life: my best friend was Susan, who I think wanted to be a cartoonist.  (Now I see this as admirable, but at the time, I desperately wanted a friend who planned on blowing up the world.)

Nothing about me looked like Harriet.  And yet, I saw myself in her.  What I saw was a girl who understood what writing was, what it meant, why it mattered.  A girl who valued her interior life more than her social life and had to struggle to make room for the friends she loved a lot.   Someone who thought she didn’t care what other people thought about her but, in fact, did.  Someone who genuinely liked herself, even as she was able to take meticulous note of her flaws.

 

Of course, I tried to spy.  I couldn’t.  Houses in Berkeley were too exposed, and there were no dumbwaiters.  Also, I was shy and terrified of being caught.  In that, I was not like Harriet.  It was a source of profound disappointment.

I tried to like tomato sandwiches.  Ultimately, I had to admit that I liked pizza more.

But I did write everything down.  I looked at people wherever I was, and I wrote about them.  And that was how I found myself, how I finally realized who I was.

I strongly urge everyone who hasn’t already done so to read the book.  It is still wonderful, and you will be a better person for having met Harriet.  She remains a treasure.

Strength of Character

Very rarely, when I finish reading a novel or watching a movie, I walk away with a hugely pleasurable feeling that is equal parts contentment and excitement.  It’s a visceral, robust sense of well-being, hard to describe.  After years of thinking about it, I finally realized that it comes from having spent time with a character who is both 1) like me in some fundamental way and 2) relaxed in her own skin, happy to be herself.

The first character I remember eliciting this feeling in me was Annika Settergren, the little girl who lives next door to Pippi Longstocking.  You’d think I would have preferred Pippi—a much more fully developed and interesting character—but I didn’t.   Pippi had unattractive hair, for one thing.  And I found the name ‘Pippi’ alarming.  I recognized in Annika a quality I saw in myself: the ability to take pleasure in quirky, exciting people without actually being—or wanting to be—quirky and exciting herself.  It was her presence in the books that compelled me to reread them many times over the course of my childhood.

I think I had a seven-year-old lesbian crush on Karen Dotrice, the young British actress who played Jane Banks in Mary Poppins.  (She was also the non-feline lead in The Three Lives of Thomasina.)  I was utterly taken with her.  Another blonde, but this one had a British accent and spectacular clothes.  I remember longing in some desperate, wordless way to be her, and feeling gloomy on the drive home from the theater as my own tedious, mid-sixties, suburban life in California slowly came back to me.

Other characters who’ve had this powerful effect on me:

--Mary Clancy (played by Haley Mills) in The Trouble With Angels,

--Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,

--Annie Hall (played by Diane Keaton),

--Sarah Cooper (played by Glenn Close) in The Big Chill,

--Joan Wilder (played by Kathleen Turner) in Romancing the Stone,

--Harriet the Spy,

--Isabelle Grossman (played by Amy Irving) in Crossing Delancey.

I could go on.

I just finished a book (We Were the Mulvaneys, by Joyce Carol Oates) that offered up no character with whom I could identify in this way, which is to say, no character who is at home with herself.  Writing a character like this is different from writing a character who is likeable or sympathetic.

Does this make sense?  If so, which characters in books or movies have especially appealed to you, and why?   I’m really curious.

Finishing What I've Started

I am working on a manuscript.  I have written 91 pages.  It will eventually be a good middle-grade novel.  I’m almost 100% sure it will sell.

I started this novel over two years ago.  Since that time, I’ve written and sold another manuscript, and written and submitted yet another to my agent.  (She’s still considering it.)  Meanwhile, I cannot finish this particular book (tentatively called Three).  It’s driving me crazy.

Part of the reason is that it’s a story about three kids—two girls and a boy—and different chapters are told from different points of view.  I have a hard time juggling that.  I have to remember obscure details about each character, and the longer I take to finish the book, the harder it is to recall them.  Recently, I decided I wanted to make a small change in the boy’s home life.  It took me weeks to incorporate it, and long after I thought I was finished, I kept finding references to the boy’s parents that no longer made any sense.

 

It is said that all writers have manuscripts in their desks (or on their computers) that were 1) never finished, 2) finished but never sold, and/or 3) abandoned for various reasons.  I have a few of these.  In one, I tried to fictionalize my mother’s experience growing up in an orphanage.  In another, I wrote about a crazy family loosely based on the one into which I was born.  I think I stopped working on these because I realized I would be divulging other people’s secrets.

  

Family loyalty is a double-edged sword when you’re a writer.

Another reason it’s hard for me to finish Three has to do with the fact that one of the characters is poor.  I spent yesterday working on a scene in which she has to figure out how to make a dinner for herself and her father out of rice and a quarter of a brick of cheese.  I felt a huge responsibility to do justice to the scene without sentimentalizing it.

After I wrote it, I felt sad and weary and spent.  It wasn’t until long after dinner (organic baby greens, roast chicken, root vegetables) that I realized why.

 

Caring about the characters I’ve created is a good sign.  It means they’re real to me, which usually means they’ll be real to other people.  But knowing that they’re living in dire circumstances makes it hard for me to want to spend time with them.  I find myself stalling: running errands, making phone calls.  Anything to avoid thinking about a kid who has to lie about why she never has enough money to get a smoothie after school with her friends.

So I’m writing here about Three in the hope that I will now feel compelled to finish it.  I will tell myself to woman up.  I will stop whining.  I will get over myself and just do it.