Tag: Queer biography

Categories
Uncategorized

BOING BOING

Review: The Extraordinary Queer Life of Harriet the Spy Author Louise Fitzhugh

Harriet the Spy was a YA fiction inspiration who possessed all of the ethics of a TMZ reporter. A young Upper East Side miscreant, Harriet’s curiosity and ambition leads her to spy on her friends, family and neighbors, recording copious notes about their activities in her ever-present notebooks. In this way, Harriet is something of an antihero. She’s also an early example of realism in children’s literature.

In her biography, Sometimes You Have To Lie, Harriet the Spy author Louise Fitzhugh’s life proves to be just as enthralling as her legendary protagonist. 

Read the full review HERE.

Categories
Uncategorized

LGBTQ NATION

Review: Was “Harriet the Spy” a Queer Hero?

A new biography, Sometimes You Have To Lie by Leslie Brody delves into Fitzhugh’s personal life, including her sexuality.

In a review of the book, the New Republic discusses how the title represents one of the most controversial moments in Harriet’s story – when her nanny, Ole Golly, tells her that sometimes it’s okay to lie. This advice comes after Harriet’s notebook is found, and she struggles to apologize to those whose feelings she has hurt, since she isn’t actually sorry.

The biography’s author speculates that his empathy for lying is likely a nod to Fitzhugh’s need to lie about her own sexuality to protect herself.

Read the full review HERE.

Categories
Uncategorized

BOOKTRIB

Review: “Sometimes You Have to Lie” Tells the Story of the Woman Behind “Harriet the Spy”

Sometimes You Have to Lie (Seal Press) by Leslie Brody tells the fascinating and somewhat shocking story of the life and times of author Louise Fitzhugh. If the name rings a bell, it’s for a very good reason: Fitzhugh was the literary genius behind the 1964 middle-grade novel, Harriet the Spy, which has, over the course of nearly three generations, become one of the most beloved books written for kids.

With exclusive access to Fitzhugh’s papers and through interviews with those who knew her, Brody for the first time brings to life the woman behind this iconic novel. The biography uncovers Fitzhugh’s inspiration behind Harriet the Spy, as well as the her struggles as a lesbian woman and triumphs as one of the most influential authors of her time.

Read on to find out more about this fascinating book and see what Brody’s peers have to say about it, too!

Categories
Uncategorized

BUSTLE

Book Roundup: The Most Anticipated Books of Winter

Much of Louise Fitzhugh’s life remains a mystery, but one author is determined to shed some light on the beloved author of Harriet the Spy. In Sometimes You Have to Lie, Leslie Brody uncovers the details of Fitzhugh’s Tennessee childhood, her relationships with modernist and postmodern literary greats in New York City, and how she navigated life in the mid-century United States as a lesbian.

Categories
Uncategorized

NEW REPUBLIC

Book review: Why Harriet the Spy had to lie

“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.” Read more…

Categories
Uncategorized

WASHINGTON POST

Book Review: Inside the mind, life and friendships that created Harriet the Spy

“In her new biography of Fitzhugh, “Sometimes You Have to Lie,” Leslie Brody identifies parallels between the author’s life and art, delightful details for fans of Fitzhugh’s creations. Ole Golly, the beloved nanny whose departure from the Welsches’ Manhattan home is the organizing trauma of “Harriet the Spy,” is probably an amalgamation of the nannies Fitzhugh knew growing up in a Memphis mansion during the Great Depression, pampered in isolation. The therapist who helps Harriet through that loss may draw from Bertram Slaff, a psychiatrist whom Fitzhugh saw during her years living in New York City, where she pursued love and ambition as a gay artist enmeshed in a network of “successful, creative, pleasure loving, ambitious, knowledgeable lesbians,” as one friend described her circle. And Harrison Withers, the bird cage designer with a skylight big enough for Harriet to spy through, cares for 26 cats whose names include not just Fitzhugh’s preferred literary luminaries (Thomas Wolfe, Dostoevsky, Faulkner) but also some of her close friends (Alex, Sandra, Marijane).” Read more…

Categories
Uncategorized

NEW YORK TIMES

Book Review: Leslie Brody’s expansive and revealing new biography of Fitzhugh, “Sometimes You Have to Lie,” assembles the clues to the personal history that shaped her conscience and creative convictions.

“in an expansive and revealing new biography, “Sometimes You Have to Lie,” Leslie Brody assembles the clues to the personal history that shaped Fitzhugh’s conscience and creative convictions. Brody, a biographer and playwright who adapted “Harriet the Spy” for the stage in 1988, has pored through correspondence, memoirs and court documents, and conducted dozens of interviews to reveal the trail that Fitzhugh left unmarked.” Read more…

Categories
Uncategorized

PARIS REVIEW

Article: The Politics of Louise Fitzhugh

In the autumn of 1974, one month shy of the publication of her new novel, Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change, Louise Fitzhugh pulled the emergency brake. Authors rarely invoke such a costly and disruptive eleventh-hour freeze, but Fitzhugh persuaded her publishers at Farrar, Straus and Giroux that her book about a Black family in New York City was incomplete. Read more…

Categories
Uncategorized

VOX

Book Roundup: The 15 best books our book critic read this year, including SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE.

“In Sometimes You Have to Lie, Leslie Brody paints a portrait of Fitzhugh that’s almost as indelible as Harriet herself. Fitzhugh apparently lived a life of whirlwind glamour, beginning from her birth as the daughter of a Southern aristocrat and a jazz dancer; continuing through her days traveling Europe to learn how to paint Italian frescoes and smoke in Parisian gay bars; and into her time as an out lesbian artist living in New York’s West Village, learning how to write from a pulp novelist who was also Patricia Highsmith’s lover. In Brody’s hands, even Fitzhugh’s clothes (Brooks Brothers menswear, combat boots, and a cape) are over-the-top marvelous. Sometimes You Have to Lie is a deeply endearing introduction to the woman who gave the American canon one of its icons.” Read more…

Categories
Uncategorized

WASHINGTON BLADE

Book Review: Harriet the Spy creator was fabulously queer

“I love reading biographies – especially, of queer artists and writers. But some bios put you to sleep. 

Happily, “Sometimes You Have to Lie” by Leslie Brody, the new, intriguing biography of queer artist and writer Louise Fitzhugh, author and illustrator of the beloved children’s book “Harriet the Spy,” won’t give you any shut-eye.” Read more…