What a great story about the life of a beloved children's book author! I really enjoyed learning about the woman behind Harriet the Spy.

Today I’m dishing about this really fascinating book about an author that I adored when I was a kid: Louise Fitzhugh. I loved Harriet the Spy, which I read in fifth grade. I remember finding it on a bookshelf at my sister’s house one summer. I wanted Harriet as my friend. My own friend and I started carrying notebooks around that summer so that we could take notes on people. We spent time “spying” and communicating our opinions on the adults in our world, often by leaving messages for each other in a small hole in the ground between our houses.

Needless to say, I was interested to join this tour and to find out about this author.

First, let me say that Louise Fitzhugh had a life quite different that I had imagined. She was progressive, unique, and totally her own person. She came from great wealth. However, her story left me a feeling sad. (No spoilers, I promise). By understanding Louise’s childhood and life, you can see how Harriet emerged.

This book is technically a biography and non-fiction, but it reads very easily. It is not dense or hard to get through. You will not use it as a doorstop (as I look fondly on my biographical tome of Ben Franklin).

Thank you so much for making me part of the tour and for my e-copy!

I enjoyed this biography, and had no idea Fitzhugh was so subversive. I will be definitely be rereading Harriet the Spy -- I was a budding Harriet as a child, complete with speckled notebook --in addition to checking out her other works mentioned in this book.

Earlier today I reviewed a biography that seemed to fail on so many levels, putting into perspective why this one, of writer and artist Louise Fitzhugh, succeeds on so many levels. It’s well-researched, just as the other one was, but – and here’s the difference – here the author has really tried to get to know her subject, and the result is an engaging, comprehensive, balanced and insightful exploration of Fitzhugh’s life and work. I’ve never read Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh’s most famous creation, but I was intrigued and entertained throughout by this biography, and really felt that I got to know its subject. A great read.

A truly exhaustive look at the life of the author of Harriet the Spy. It was very well researched stretching back to her parent’s childhoods and there was a lot of context about the world she grew up in and now she lived. The book dragged a bit in the middle, not due to the author I don’t think but because it was a lot of information about one person. I enjoyed how she set the stage fo what was going on culturally in the world without it seeming made up like some other recent biographies have.

Spanning just three books, Harriet the Spy (1964–1979), the children’s series focused on the life of an intrepid, 11-year-old New York City sleuth, has been called a “milestone in children’s literature” and is estimated to have sold as many as 2.5 million copies. It was also banned in much of the Southern U.S., the reason, summed up by a school board in Xenia, Ohio in 1983, being that it encouraged children to disrespect their parents by talking back, spying on others, and lying.

The title of Leslie Brodie’s biography of Harriet the Spy’s creator, Louise Fitzhugh, is aptly named after one of Fitzhugh’s character’s most memorable lines. In Sometimes You Have to Lie, Brodie traces the author’s privileged but turbulent upbringing in segregated Tennessee to her twenties as a painter in New York, and her later adulthood as a successful children’s book writer and illustrator, revealing Fitzhugh to be just as irreverent and frank as her beloved creation.

By the time she turned nineteen, Fitzhugh had already hit reject on the trappings of debutante life. Her strained relationship with her domineering father went from bad to worse after a summer job at the Memphis Commercial Appeal gave her unlimited archival access to her parents’ scandalous divorce. While the details were altogether sordid, nothing shocked Fitzhugh more than an account of a custody argument that allegedly ended with her mother tossing baby Louise onto a divan and turning on her heel. Shortly thereafter Fitzhugh cut ties with her family and moved permanently north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

In New York Fitzhugh devoted herself to her artistic pursuits, first at Bard College and then in Manhattan, where she studied at the Art Student’s League. In addition to her strongmindedness, later reflected in Harriet the Spy, Fitzhugh was known for her eccentric style of dress; the artist favored tailored velvet suits, Brooks Brothers shirts, and theatrical capes that gave her diminutive form added flair. Fitzhugh lived as an out lesbian for most of her life—a fact her estate has tried to minimize following her death.

Fitzhugh found limited success as a painter, but a collaboration with her friend Sandra Scopettone led to the idea for Suzuki Beane, a picture book about a grade-school beatnik. From there Fitzhugh began dreaming up a heroine of her own. In a letter to the poet James Merrill, Fitzhugh described her idea for a book about “a nasty little girl who keeps a notebook on all her friends.” That nasty little girl would become Harriet M. Welsch, Upper East Side Spy, for which Fitzhugh would not only write the text but also provide the illustrations.

Lacing up her high tops and strapping on her tool belt, Harriet prowls the streets to record the comings and goings of the neighborhood crowd in her private notebook with the brutal honesty only an 11-year-old could manage—and revolutionizing children’s literature in the process.

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE is an in-depth look into the life and growth of Louise Fitzhugh. Her unconventional upbringing and bohemian style life say much about why Harriet, the Spy is who she is. There are also a vast number of other writing gigs and books attributed to Fitzhugh about which I knew nothing.
This is a book that will probably be most enjoyed by those who are Fitzhugh’s fans. It is filled, sometimes overly so, with information about her entire life, including her family, her rebelliousness, and her considerable quest for new adventures and experiences. Fitzhugh lived a life many people might expect of an artist, although it might be less expected when one considers the author to be one of children’s books.
While this book didn’t excite me, I think it probably will be captivating for anyone who is a fan of Fitzhugh’s work. I would recommend it to anyone who likes both biographies and Louise Fitzhugh.
My thanks to Perseus Books for an advanced copy for this review. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

"In this inspiring biography, discover the true story of Harriet the Spy author Louise Fitzhugh - and learn about the woman behind one of literature's most beloved heroines.

Harriet the Spy, first published in 1964, has mesmerized generations of readers and launched a million diarists. Its beloved antiheroine, Harriet, is erratic, unsentimental, and endearing - very much like the woman who created her, Louise Fitzhugh.

Born in 1928, Fitzhugh was raised in segregated Memphis, but she soon escaped her cloistered world and headed for New York, where her expanded milieu stretched from the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village to the art world of postwar Europe, and her circle of friends included members of the avant-garde like Maurice Sendak and Lorraine Hansberry. Fitzhugh's novels, written in an era of political defiance, are full of resistance: to authority, to conformity, and even - radically, for a children's author - to make-believe.

As a children's author and a lesbian, Fitzhugh was often pressured to disguise her true nature. Sometimes You Have to Lie tells the story of her hidden life and of the creation of her masterpiece, which remains long after her death as a testament to the complicated relationship between truth, secrecy, and individualism."

The life! The legacy! I can't think of anyone who shouldn't read this book!

A fantastic biography of a woman I've always wanted to know more about since Harriet the Spy made a huge impact on me. In fact, in 1974 at 11 years old (Harriet's age), I wrote a letter in Fitzhugh, and her publisher wrote to me that she'd recently died. I tried to research more about her life but hadn't been very successful. So, I ate up this book.

Brody powerfully explores the ups and downs of the creative process (in addition to being a writer, Fitzhugh was an illustrator and a painter), and weaves in details about Fitzhugh's upbringing the zeitgeist of the times she lived to paint a multi-dimensional portrait of a complex woman. I was especially gripped by the way Fitzhugh, in her writing and her life, grappled with issues of sexuality, gender (fluidity), feminism, race, class--and children's emancipation.

She saw children as full humans, not to be condescended to, and portrayed them as such. No wonder generations of young people love her work.

Thank you #NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

An absolutely delightful and engaging biography on the woman behind one of my favorite books, Harriet the Spy. I knew absolutely nothing about Louise Fitzhugh prior to reading this, and found her a truly wonderful artist who knew so many people and had a genuine talent that Harriet the Spy was able to exemplify... but she had so much more to offer. I highly recommend this to fans of Harriet, anyone who appreciates LGBTQ+ history, and fans of midcentury literature in general.

Sometimes You Have to Lie, a biography of Louise Fitzhugh by Leslie Brody, covers Fitzhugh’s life from her birth in Memphis to her career in New York to her death in Connecticut. Not only does Brody explore who Fitzhugh was as a lesbian artist and writer in the 1950’s and beyond, but also she does an excellent job of introducing you to the other “characters” in Louise’s life from her parents, her various partners, her close friends and publishers. I learned so much about the woman wrote about the complex emotions that children feel that adults so often dismiss and continued to write even through harsh reviews and criticism.

In the end result is a complete biography that captures the complex person that is Louise Fitzhugh. A woman who fell in and out of love, drank to her success, suffer bouts of loneliness, and felt the frustration of a Jim Crow South, but also changed the genre of kid lit forever.

I truly wish that the biography contained images of the many works of art that are described in the book. I think this would have added another layer of depth, but based on the author’s notes, this might not have been approved by Fitzhugh’s estate.

4 out of 5 stars.

Harriet the Spy is one of the books from my childhood which stuck with me always. When I saw Sometimes You Have to Lie I was excited to read more about the author. After I read Harriet, I began people watching, trying to puzzle out their lives and figuring out what makes people do the things they do. One of the things I loved was that Fitzhugh's own way of living her life, not following the rules and living her own life and there is nothing wrong with being a little different and quirky. That's what I took form Harriet and love that the author taught me that. This interesting, well written biography made me pull out my old copy and read again for nostalgia.
Thanks NetGalley and Leslie Brody for a chance to read this book for a review and reclaim some of my childhood!

I read Harriet the Spy when I was 8 or 9. I wanted a black and white composition notebook so I could jot my musings as I slide on people. I wanted to be a writer. I read Brody's biography on Fitzhugh with great interest. I knew nothing about the author and hadn't realized she wrote other books after Harriet. I did read The Long Secret as a child but it didn't leave much of an impression. I marveled that Ursula Norton was her editor. Fitzhugh was quixotic and lived life on her own terms. I read this book with gray interest and I have the urge to break out that old notebook and takes notes on people once again.

An engaging biography of Louise Fitzhugh: well-researched, nicely balanced, and interesting. Brody does a nice job giving us a clear idea of what Fitzhugh was like as a child, a student, a person, as well as a writer and artist.
Brody’s examination of Fitzhugh’s personal relationships, her lovers and friends, is fascinating and feels fair and careful, particularly when discussing Fitzhugh’s later years and death.
I would have liked more excerpts from Fitzhugh’s letters and personal papers, as well as her art. This would have provided a more textured reckoning with the way Fitzhugh balanced her art, her writing, and her life, and for those who are unfamiliar with the art beyond the line drawings in Harriet the Spy, it might give access to a range of Fitzhugh’s work that isn’t easily available elsewhere. However, based on Brody’s elucidation on the last years of Fitzhugh’s life, it seems a fair assumption that those materials may be unavailable to scholars.
I highly recommend Sometimes You Have to Lie to anyone who loved Harriet the Spy and grew up wondering about her creator.

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I never knew anything about Louise Fitzhugh, so I was curious to know more about this person who wrote one of my all-time favorite, and most influential books. She certainly led an interesting, if brief, life, and this book presented a fascinating story. When I was a kid, I had an understanding that girls could do or become anything they wanted, and that having a fulfilling career was an obtainable objective. I was born at the tail end of the Baby Boom era, and I didn't realize that at the time this was a radical idea. But I grew up with Harriet the Spy, having read the book dozens of times, and I think I internalized the idea that it was okay to rebel, and to not conform to traditional expectations. I just knew that when I read Harriet the Spy, I wanted to be exactly like Harriet, spy route, notebooks, tomato sandwiches and all. I still have my original copies of Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret, and I think it's time to re-read them!