Catherine Egan's Blog - Posts Tagged "louise-fitzhugh"
The Long Secret
Dear Blog,
I was devastated by Aslan's Death when I was five. A few years later I read Anne of Green Gables and longed to be a red-haired orphan and go cracking my slate over the skulls of impudent boys. I had nightmares about the Horned King from The Book of Three. There are hundreds of books that expanded my world and my self far beyond the narrow confines of my own single life and my own safe childhood. Those books became a part of me and yay, you know, that's nice and fairly obvious, and all of them are surely a part of Why I Write and How I Write. Still, there are three books that stand out not necessarily as my favorites (though I loved and love them dearly) but because of how they made me think in new ways about the power of books and about my own desire to Be A Writer: The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, Bilgewater by Jane Gardam, and I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith.
I read all three of them between the ages of 11 and 13, an important time of transition, I guess, from childhood to adolescence but also, I think, from being one kind of would-be writer (the child who says I'm Going To Be A Writer and begins countless tedious imitative novels and never finishes anything) to being another kind of would-be writer (the young teen who begins countless tedious imitative novels and never finishes anything but is nonetheless beginning to think about writing and books in a different and slightly more mature way and is not far from writing her first short story). I am rereading those books now and plan to blog about all three. This week: The Long Secret.
The Long Secret is the very strange and beautifully written sequel to the wildly successful Harriet The Spy. I read Harriet when I was ten, and I must have read it a hundred times. I loved it. I knew it by heart. I wanted to be Harriet. I was eleven years old when my mother found and gave me The Long Secret I snatched it up and read it at once, eager for more Harriet with all her brash, wacky confidence and her snarky notebook entries. I would have been disappointed if the book hadn't been such a revelation.
What I got was Beth Ellen. I mean, there was plenty of Harriet too, wonderful Harriet moments, Harriet becoming more and more the writer we know she is, with her unrelenting curiosity about human nature and her need to find words for feelings and stories about everyone. But it isn't only or even mostly Harriet's story. The book adopts both Harriet's POV and Beth Ellen's. Beth Ellen is Harriet's painfully shy, silent classmate from the first book, the one who will cry if you look at her funny, and while the two girls are not in any way natural friends, they are "summer" friends due simply to proximity, as their families holiday in the same seaside town. "Mousy" Beth Ellen, and Beth Ellen's rage, were what made this book so riveting, so shocking, to eleven-year-old me.
I really noticed good writing for the first time as I read the book. Rereading it 25 years later, I remember many inconsequential lines because they so impressed me at the age of eleven. I wanted to write like that. The way Louise Fitzhugh described things, people, feelings, thoughts, moments made the whole world more vivid and strange and alive. Things you might not think to notice, but Louise Fitzhugh noticed them, and made you notice them too. That impressed me. But mostly, I think I became aware that a book could offer more than feelings, more than an exciting story. Here was insight, truths about being human and about capital-L Life. Books and writing held a revelatory power I had never considered or imagined before.
It shook me to my core when Beth Ellen's grandmother says to her: "Shy people are angry people." I wanted to be Harriet, I pretended to be Harriet, but the truth was that I was closer to Beth Ellen. I was shy, and I was angry. It was something I'd never thought about clearly, a connection I had never considered. Over and over I read the scene in which Beth Ellen snaps, tears her room apart, floods the bathroom, and sits under the running water while her mother and her mother's lover and the maid bang on the bathroom door.
She hugged her knees. I will flood the house, she thought. Then I will begin to grow and be huge. I will get so monstrously big that I will break the bathroom out and fill the house, the yard, all of Water Mill. I will tower over the Montauk Highway like a colossus. They will all run away like ants.
I don't think there is another author who writes about a child's experience of rage as brilliantly as Louise Fitzhugh does. In Harriet The Spy, Harriet falls apart when she is not allowed to write in her notebook. Harriet knows who and what she is and when that self is thwarted and denied, she rebels absolutely. In The Long Secret, Beth Ellen has none of Harriet's certainty. She doesn't know who she is or who she wants to be until she learns who she isn't - her mother's daughter. Her meltdown when her mother decides to take her away with her is as breathtaking a portrayal of rage and despair as I've ever read anywhere.
The book includes candid and hilarious writing about the start of menstruation and the preteen struggle with religion, a good few years before Judy Blume wrote Are you there, God, it's me, Margaret? (and what can you say about a book that opens with a cashier getting an anonymous note that says "Jesus Hates You"?). But that aspect of the book only vaguely interested me, at eleven. Even the central mystery (who is leaving nasty notes all over town?) was periphery. What struck me more, both then and now, was the way she was writing about the ambition of children, and the rage children experience when they are thwarted or controlled in their attempts to be themselves.
Perhaps The Long Secret stands out as a book for children that is not really plot-driven (although there is a sort of plot, certainly). The story meanders here and there, exploring character, human nature, and the question of how to be and who to be. It was the first time I was aware of a book exploring these things, aware of the comic yet sympathetic perceptiveness in the author's portrayal of her characters, the sheer genius in her having made these people up. And how skillful she was, getting right to the heart of things, planting her story on that precarious edge between childhood and adolescence and opening it right up to bleed all over the page in such tight and lovely sentences. I had always wanted to be a writer, but this was the first book that made me think about what kind of writer I wanted to be, the first book that showed me what a book can do besides entertain, and the first book that pointed me towards painful truths about myself.
I don't know why it was never as successful as Harriet the Spy. Maybe it was just too strange a book. It is a strange book. "Accept yourself" sounds so twee and trite but then again it really is one of life's big struggles, isn't it? Especially for children, who have had less practice at it. At eleven, I recognized Beth Ellen's fear, self-loathing, and rage so acutely, and I will never forget my elation when she slides down the banister past all the portraits that used to scare her, refusing to be shaped, controlled, or frightened anymore.
Yours, still-a-little-bit-Harriet-and-a-little-bit-Beth-Ellen,
Catherine
I was devastated by Aslan's Death when I was five. A few years later I read Anne of Green Gables and longed to be a red-haired orphan and go cracking my slate over the skulls of impudent boys. I had nightmares about the Horned King from The Book of Three. There are hundreds of books that expanded my world and my self far beyond the narrow confines of my own single life and my own safe childhood. Those books became a part of me and yay, you know, that's nice and fairly obvious, and all of them are surely a part of Why I Write and How I Write. Still, there are three books that stand out not necessarily as my favorites (though I loved and love them dearly) but because of how they made me think in new ways about the power of books and about my own desire to Be A Writer: The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, Bilgewater by Jane Gardam, and I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith.
I read all three of them between the ages of 11 and 13, an important time of transition, I guess, from childhood to adolescence but also, I think, from being one kind of would-be writer (the child who says I'm Going To Be A Writer and begins countless tedious imitative novels and never finishes anything) to being another kind of would-be writer (the young teen who begins countless tedious imitative novels and never finishes anything but is nonetheless beginning to think about writing and books in a different and slightly more mature way and is not far from writing her first short story). I am rereading those books now and plan to blog about all three. This week: The Long Secret.
The Long Secret is the very strange and beautifully written sequel to the wildly successful Harriet The Spy. I read Harriet when I was ten, and I must have read it a hundred times. I loved it. I knew it by heart. I wanted to be Harriet. I was eleven years old when my mother found and gave me The Long Secret I snatched it up and read it at once, eager for more Harriet with all her brash, wacky confidence and her snarky notebook entries. I would have been disappointed if the book hadn't been such a revelation.
What I got was Beth Ellen. I mean, there was plenty of Harriet too, wonderful Harriet moments, Harriet becoming more and more the writer we know she is, with her unrelenting curiosity about human nature and her need to find words for feelings and stories about everyone. But it isn't only or even mostly Harriet's story. The book adopts both Harriet's POV and Beth Ellen's. Beth Ellen is Harriet's painfully shy, silent classmate from the first book, the one who will cry if you look at her funny, and while the two girls are not in any way natural friends, they are "summer" friends due simply to proximity, as their families holiday in the same seaside town. "Mousy" Beth Ellen, and Beth Ellen's rage, were what made this book so riveting, so shocking, to eleven-year-old me.
I really noticed good writing for the first time as I read the book. Rereading it 25 years later, I remember many inconsequential lines because they so impressed me at the age of eleven. I wanted to write like that. The way Louise Fitzhugh described things, people, feelings, thoughts, moments made the whole world more vivid and strange and alive. Things you might not think to notice, but Louise Fitzhugh noticed them, and made you notice them too. That impressed me. But mostly, I think I became aware that a book could offer more than feelings, more than an exciting story. Here was insight, truths about being human and about capital-L Life. Books and writing held a revelatory power I had never considered or imagined before.
It shook me to my core when Beth Ellen's grandmother says to her: "Shy people are angry people." I wanted to be Harriet, I pretended to be Harriet, but the truth was that I was closer to Beth Ellen. I was shy, and I was angry. It was something I'd never thought about clearly, a connection I had never considered. Over and over I read the scene in which Beth Ellen snaps, tears her room apart, floods the bathroom, and sits under the running water while her mother and her mother's lover and the maid bang on the bathroom door.
She hugged her knees. I will flood the house, she thought. Then I will begin to grow and be huge. I will get so monstrously big that I will break the bathroom out and fill the house, the yard, all of Water Mill. I will tower over the Montauk Highway like a colossus. They will all run away like ants.
I don't think there is another author who writes about a child's experience of rage as brilliantly as Louise Fitzhugh does. In Harriet The Spy, Harriet falls apart when she is not allowed to write in her notebook. Harriet knows who and what she is and when that self is thwarted and denied, she rebels absolutely. In The Long Secret, Beth Ellen has none of Harriet's certainty. She doesn't know who she is or who she wants to be until she learns who she isn't - her mother's daughter. Her meltdown when her mother decides to take her away with her is as breathtaking a portrayal of rage and despair as I've ever read anywhere.
The book includes candid and hilarious writing about the start of menstruation and the preteen struggle with religion, a good few years before Judy Blume wrote Are you there, God, it's me, Margaret? (and what can you say about a book that opens with a cashier getting an anonymous note that says "Jesus Hates You"?). But that aspect of the book only vaguely interested me, at eleven. Even the central mystery (who is leaving nasty notes all over town?) was periphery. What struck me more, both then and now, was the way she was writing about the ambition of children, and the rage children experience when they are thwarted or controlled in their attempts to be themselves.
Perhaps The Long Secret stands out as a book for children that is not really plot-driven (although there is a sort of plot, certainly). The story meanders here and there, exploring character, human nature, and the question of how to be and who to be. It was the first time I was aware of a book exploring these things, aware of the comic yet sympathetic perceptiveness in the author's portrayal of her characters, the sheer genius in her having made these people up. And how skillful she was, getting right to the heart of things, planting her story on that precarious edge between childhood and adolescence and opening it right up to bleed all over the page in such tight and lovely sentences. I had always wanted to be a writer, but this was the first book that made me think about what kind of writer I wanted to be, the first book that showed me what a book can do besides entertain, and the first book that pointed me towards painful truths about myself.
I don't know why it was never as successful as Harriet the Spy. Maybe it was just too strange a book. It is a strange book. "Accept yourself" sounds so twee and trite but then again it really is one of life's big struggles, isn't it? Especially for children, who have had less practice at it. At eleven, I recognized Beth Ellen's fear, self-loathing, and rage so acutely, and I will never forget my elation when she slides down the banister past all the portraits that used to scare her, refusing to be shaped, controlled, or frightened anymore.
Yours, still-a-little-bit-Harriet-and-a-little-bit-Beth-Ellen,
Catherine
