So I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m positive that Harriet the Spy is autistic.

Now, before you go getting your panties in a knot, know this:

  1. I am autistic, so yeah, I’m prone to headcanon every character I like as autistic
  2. Despite the above, it’s rare that I feel I can say it so definitely about a character.
  3. If you think “autistic” means only the non-verbal, hand-flapping kind of autism you are wrong and need to learn more about autism.
  4. The condition formerly known as Asperger’s Syndrome no longer exists in the DSM-V and is simply considered “autism”.

For those of you who, unlike me, don’t rabidly re-read the books you enjoyed as a child despite being a grown-ass adult, or for those of you who never read this awesome book, let me give you a brief summary.

Harriet the Spy is about a spoiled eleven-year-old girl living in upper-class New York in the 1960s. She’s a quirky kid with a highly educated and intelligent nanny who understands her thoroughly. When her nanny, “Ole Golly” moves away, Harriet is devastated. Without the guidance of Ole Golly, Harriet’s quirks, which include spying on the neighbours and writing all of her thoughts down in a closely-guarded notebook, immediately begin to cause her interpersonal problems. She loses her friends, her interest in school, and basically has a total nervous breakdown which her loving but oblivious parents are totally at a loss to understand.

It’s a BOSS book, and if you haven’t read it, you should.

I’ve always identified strongly with Harriet the Spy, and found her a deeply sympathetic character. But it wasn’t until I discovered that I am autistic that I realized that Harriet the Spy is totally about an autistic kid who has lost both her comfort object AND the only person who gets her.

Why do I say she’s autistic?

Oh, man. How do I count the ways.

Let’s start with the things we learn about Harriet at the beginning of the book.

Harriet Plays By Making Lists

At the opening of the book, Harriet is trying to interest her friend, Sport, in a game of hers which she calls Town. Before she even begins to play, she creates a whole world. She makes a list of the entire population of the town, their names, jobs, and where they live. Once she has finished this detailed world building she places them in an imaginary town on the ground and hovers over it like a god while the inhabitants play out their minor suburban dramas.

I sympathize with this so hard. I would spend hours as a kid bouncing around my room planning the imaginary game I was going to play.

Studies show that autistic girls do engage in imaginative play, but that it tends to be unusually intense in focus and may involve a lot of heavy planning or list-making. It often involves their perseverations or “special interests” – that intense focus on a particular interest which tends to eclipse all other things, including other kinds of play or interaction with peers.

Which brings me to…

Harriet Prefers Note-Taking Over Almost Anything

Harriet takes notes constantly. She brings her notebook with her everywhere and writes down every thought she has. She has a “route” of people she spies on and she will decline an invitation from friends rather than miss out on her spy route. Writing in her notebook brings Harriet deep satisfaction, and when she is doing it the world often seems to disappear. She will slam her notebook closed after finishing a thought only to realize that people are staring at her.

I also sympathize with this. When I am reading, or writing, this is exactly what happens to me. And I often blow off friends or family to write and re-write and re-re-write my stories.

But more importantly, Harriet’s obsession with her notebook meets the DSM criteria for “Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (e.g, strong attachment to or preoccupation with unusual objects, excessively circumscribed or perseverative interest).”

Luckily for Harriet (up until Ole Golly leaves), Ole Golly is tolerant of Harriet’s interest in spying and taking notes. When Harriet shows disdain for learning how to dance, Ole Golly points out that a spy needs to be able to blend in, and uses Mata Hari as a model. Harriet becomes more interested in dance class as soon as Ole Golly is able to connect it to her special interest.

Clever Ole Golly.

Harriet Adores Routine

All kids appreciate a stable and predictable routine. But for we autistics, it’s a lifeline. There is a deep, abiding comfort that comes from having things happen the same way again and again and again. Sameness is bliss. That doesn’t mean that we don’t enjoy a bit of spice to life, but it is much more enjoyable if that variety happens on a solid platform of predictability.

Harriet loves predictability. She likes to wear the same clothes day after day. Her mother tries to throw out her old clothes and Harriet rescues them from the trash. Every morning she follows the exact same routine. This includes refusing to drink her milk – regardless of how thirsty she is – until her mother says, “Drink your milk.”

That’s just not neurotypical.

It was time for her cake and milk. Every day at three-forty she had cake and milk. Harriet loved doing everything every day in the same way.

“Time for my cake, for my cake and milk, time for my milk and cake.” She ran yelling through the front door of her house.

Every afternoon she follows the same routine, banging in the door, running into their cook (I wish I had a cook!) and demanding her “cake and milk” which she gets every day after school.

Every night, she reads until Ole Golly comes to take away her flashlight. She knows Ole Golly will take her flashlight. Ole Golly knows she will read with it. The taking-away of the flashlight is part of her standard nightly routine, which she treasures.

Harriet doesn’t just like routine. She adores and demands it. It fills her with a fierce, satisfied glee. In fact, I would say that she has an “Insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns or verbal nonverbal behavior”.

Harriet Samefoods Tomato Sandwiches

Samefoods aren’t in the DSM-V, but every autistic knows about them. That food that you could just eat, like, for every meal for days, weeks, or even months at a time.

For Harriet, that food is the tomato sandwich. She has insisted on bringing a tomato sandwich to school every day for four years. She loves her some tomato sandwiches.

You could also say that she samefoods “cake and milk” but it isn’t clarified whether it’s the same kind of cake every day or not.

Harriet’s Perseverations Impact Her Personal Life

When Harriet’s friends read her notebook, including all of the mean, un-filtered thoughts that she has had about them, she becomes an instant social outcast. At first, she is furious with them for touching her notebook. Then she is frightened by their “mean” looks. As a response to this, she withdraws further into her special interest, becoming so absorbed in her notebook writing that she completely ignores the teacher in school. This results in her notebook being taken away, which plunges her into an even deeper depression.

Harriet did her work. She didn’t care anymore about signing her name, and she got no pleasure from the work she did, but she did it. Everything bored her. She found that when she didn’t have a notebook it was hard for her to think.

When she comes home from school, she doesn’t care about her cake and milk. All she cares about is getting her notebook back.

“My NOTEBOOK,” Harriet shouted.

“Oh, all right, all right. Can’t you wait just one minute till I get this soap off my hands?”

“No, no, no, I can’t wait. I want it NOW.”

“All right. All right.”

Harriet grabbed it and ran out of the room.

“Hey, how about your cake and milk?”

Harriet begins acting out, pulling cruel tricks on her friends and infuriating their cook by deliberately stomping around to ruin the baking cake. She walks out of school, refuses to attend school, and generally has a complete meltdown.

The loss of Harriet’s notebook seems to bother her even more than the loss of her friends.

Which brings me to:

Harriet Has Poor Social Skills

Part of Harriet’s fascination with studying the behaviour of others is her poor theory of mind. She’s a child and many children are still developing theory of mind, but Harriet is baffled and intrigued by people who feel differently about things than she does, which, quite frankly, is pretty much everyone.

At the start of the book Harriet is not particularly well-liked but tolerated and respected by her classmates, even though she holds many of them in disdain. She scribbles cynical, intolerant thoughts in her notebook and says little of them out loud. She has a couple of close friends who seem bonded by their different-ness. They don’t have much in common but they tolerate each other’s weirdnesses. Harriet doesn’t seek the social approval of other people, often reacting indifferently when she annoys others (such as the cook) with her loud, rowdy, and stubborn behaviour.

It is only when the class and her two friends actively side against her that she becomes unhappy. And even then she doesn’t seem to grasp that she has hurt their feelings. All she knows is that they stole her book, read her secrets, and are now acting mean and hateful to her. She doesn’t know what to do with it, and she doesn’t recognize their retaliations (deliberately allowing her to intercept mean notes about her) as payback for the hurt she caused. It does not occur to her to apologize. It does not occur to her that they see her as the mean and hateful one.

I would call this “Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships, ranging, for example, from difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts; to difficulties in sharing imaginative play or in making friends; to absence of interest in peers.”

I won’t say that Harriet lacks empathy, because she doesn’t. She actually works quite hard to learn about and consider other people’s points of view. She wonders how it would feel to be a rich lady who doesn’t work but talks on the phone all day, or a poor cat-hoarder, or a hungry delivery boy. She is capable of putting herself in their shoes with some thought and effort. This fascination with human social behaviour is common in autistic girls, who are more attuned to their peers than most autistic boys.

But it doesn’t come instinctively to her. She doesn’t consider how her friends must feel, reading her mean thoughts. And she doesn’t know how to pacify other people with white lies or kind words.

Harriet’s deficits in social skills have been masked by her careful study of human interaction. But now that she is the centre of the drama, not just observing it, and doesn’t have Ole Golly to explain human nature to her, she is lost at sea.

Harriet Can’t Express Herself As Well Verbally

There is a big difference between Harriet’s spoken speech versus her written speech. Much of her day involves people saying things to her and Harriet writing her responses in her notebook rather than saying them aloud. When she does speak out loud it is usually brief and to the point, a direct question, or (if she is excited) in the form of repetition.

“Hello cook, hello, cooky, hello, hello, hello, hello,” sang Harriet. Then she opened her notebook and wrote:

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. I ALWAYS DO CARRY ON A LOT.

Harriet often answers questions with brief, perfunctory speech but then writes eloquently on the subject a second later. Instead of voicing her thoughts aloud and sharing them with others, she writes them down and keeps them to herself. I say this qualifies as “Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to failure to initiate or respond to social interactions.”

Why Was This Book Written?

Harriet the Spy is one of the most three-dimensional characters in children’s literature of the 60s. Her quirks, flaws, and gender non-conformity were highly controversial when the book came out. It’s a heart-wrenching, deeply psychological sort of a book, full of wisdom and believable characters.

And it’s so, so clearly about an autistic girl whose life falls apart and how she survives it.

I would love to know why Louise Fitzhugh wrote this book. She died of an aneurysm at age 46 so we’ll never know. We do know that she was gay, which may partially explain Harriet’s pants-wearing, door-banging, housewife-disdaining ways. But was she autistic? Was Harriet the Spy based on someone she knew? Herself even?

Either way, I’m glad she wrote it. Because it’s one of those books that helps you understand yourself as you read it.


CLLynch

Author of "Chemistry", the feminist Zomromcom you never knew you needed to read.

2 Comments

Actually Autistic Blogs List · March 29, 2019 at 7:36 pm

C.L., your blog will soon be added to our Actually Autistic Blogs List (anautismobserver.wordpress.com). Please click on the “How do you want your blog listed?” link at the top of that site to customize your blog’s description on the list (or to decline).
Thank you.
Judy (An Autism Observer)

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