Sunday, February 12th @ 2pm at Occidental Center for the Arts Literary Series: An afternoon with local award-winning author Suzanne Maggio as she shares selected readings and answers questions about her latest book, “Estrellas – Moments of Illumination along El Camino De Santiago”. Her debut memoir, The Cardinal Club, was a finalist in both the 2021 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the 2020 IAN Book of the Year Awards. This is a free event, donations gratefully accepted. Fine refreshments and books for sale, author signing. 3850 Doris Murphy Way, Occidental, CA. OCA’s facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. For more info: occidentalcenterforthearts.org or 707-874-9392.
Sunday, January 29th at 2-4 pm Occidental Center for the Arts Literary Series presents A Celebration of Elizabeth Herron, our new Sonoma County Poet Laureate and book launch for her recently published In the Cities of Sleep. She will also discuss her Being Brave Poetry Project and website Poetry As It Happens. Free admission, all donations gratefully invited. Refreshments for sale. Selected readings, Q&A, book sales & signing. OCA: 3850 Doris Murphy Way, Occidental, CA. OCA’s facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. For more info: occidentalcenterforthearts.org or 707-874-9392.
This year brought a fascinating and eclectic number of books by Latino authors to store shelves and online selections, spanning different genres and earning high praise from readers and reviewers alike.
Below is our list of 10 very distinctive works by U.S. Latino authors.
‘Trust’ by Hernan Diaz
Courtesy Penguin Random House
The award-winning Peruvian American writer organizes this novel about the life of powerful financier Andrew Bevel and his wife, Mildred, into four sections, each forcing the reader to question what’s true and who really holds the power as it examines the ruthless pursuit of wealth. The novel, which is being developed as an HBO limited series, is a fictional dive into the world of finance, the 1920s and the ensuing Great Depression.
The compelling novel has been recognized as one of the top 10 books of 2022 by The New York Times and The Washington Post and as one of the best books of 2022 by Time, NPR, Vogue, Oprah Daily and others.
‘High-Risk Homosexual: A Memoir’ by Edgar Gomez
High-Risk Homosexual, A Memoir by Edgar GomezCourtesy Soft Skull Press
Labeled as a “high-risk homosexual” after a doctor’s office visit, Edgar Gomez describes his experience growing up as a gay Latinx man and the issues around Latinidad and machismo in this highly praised debut memoir.
Through his humorous and touching storytelling, he invites readers into different aspects of his world — from his uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to the queer spaces where he learned to love being a gay Latinx man.
‘Olga Dies Dreaming’ by Xochitl Gonzalez
Courtesy Macmillan Publishers
In this novel about an Ivy League-educated high-end wedding planner — whose parents were Puerto Rican activists — the author deftly depicts a woman trying to balance the different worlds within New York, as well as family, work, romance and, more importantly, herself.
“The author paints a vivid and lively story throughout, highlighting various family dynamics, politics, history, queerness, inter-generational trauma, love, and more,” said Karen Ugarte, the manager at Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in Los Angeles. “It has a little bit of everything!”
‘A Ballad of Love and Glory’ by Reyna Grande
Courtesy Blackstone Publishing
Inspired by true events and historical figures in the Mexican American War, Grande’s novel follows the story of Ximena Salomé, a Mexican healer whose hopes of building a family come crashing down after the Texas Rangers kill her husband. After she joins the Mexican army to honor her late husband’s memory, she meets an Irish immigrant who eventually joins the Mexican army — and they fight for a future together.
Grande is the award-winning author of the acclaimed novel “The Distance Between Us,” as well as “Across a Hundred Mountains” and “Dancing with Butterflies.”
‘Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality’ by Tanya Katerí Hernández
Courtesy Beacon Press
“Because it’s so entrenched to deny that we have these problems with racism,” she said in a recent interview, Afro Latina legal scholar and professor Tanya K. Hernández’s book uses legal cases and accounts to show how Latinos have discriminated against Black Latinos and other people of color in different areas — from housing to employment to education.
Her book emphasizes the importance of recognizing the prevalence of Latino racism and its impact on everyday life as the Hispanic population grows, as well as its corrosive, real-world impact on Black Latinos’ and others’ livelihoods, economic opportunities and well-being.
‘The Hurting Kind’ by Ada Limón
Courtesy Ada Limón
In “The Hurting Kind,” Limón, who this year became the first female U.S. poet laureate of Latino and Mexican American heritage, weaves indelible snapshots of experiences and people — both living and dead — with unforgettable images of the flowers, trees and animals around her or lovingly dredged from her memories.
“We’re still in the middle of a pandemic — bouncing from trauma to trauma,” Limón said in an earlier interview. “It’s been such a tormented time.” Poetry, she said, is a way to connect to feelings, emotions and even stillness.
‘The Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land’ by Graciela Mochkofsky
Courtesy Penguin Random House
Journalist and author Graciela Mochkofsky, the dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, spent years researching the incredible story of Segundo Villanueva, a Peruvian self-taught biblical scholar who converted to Judaism and led a group of followers first to the jungle and later to Israel. Although Villanueva’s life took a different turn, many of his followers and their children, known as “Inca Jews,” are still in Israel.
Mochkofsky, who is from Argentina, said in a discussion of her book that Villanueva was “a pioneer” of a movement that is spreading in Latin America — dozens of communities across several countries that have mainly eschewed Catholicism, turned to evangelicalism and then turned to Judaism.
‘A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad’ by Richard T. Rodríguez
Courtesy Duke University Press
Why would Mexican and Chicano youths like British post-punk music? “The answer is ‘why not?'” University of California, Riverside, professor Richard T. Rodríguez says about his book.
“’A Kiss across the Ocean’ is more than an academic read!” said Sarah Rafael García, an author and the founder of LibroMobile in Santa Ana, California. “It intersects the personal with post-punk music and icons, creating an era for those of us in U.S. Latinx communities who felt left out of mainstream culture and genders in the ’80s, early ’90s and even to this day.”
‘Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir’ by Erika L. Sánchez
Courtesy Penguin Random House
Published before the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist Erika L. Sánchez’s memoir is an account of her life growing up in a working-class Mexican immigrant household in Chicago, exploring her sexuality, religion and feminism and grappling with racism and colorism. She writes about how an abortion saved her life and candidly details her experiences dealing with suicidal thoughts and depression.
Sánchez, who is also the author of “I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter,” a 2017 hit that is being adapted into a Netflix film directed by actor American Ferrera, spotlights the issue of mental illness by describing her experience with electroconvulsive therapy and her time in a psychiatric ward. “It’s an illness that really takes over your entire life, and you need a medical specialist to determine what it is that you are suffering from and to get the right kind of treatment,” Sánchez told MSNBC host Alicia Menendez on her show, “American Voices,” in July.
‘Solito’ by Javier Zamora
Courtesy Penguin Random House
In his captivating memoir, poet Javier Zamora relates his migration journey from El Salvador to the U.S. as a young boy. Writing from his perspective at 9, he talks about traveling thousands of miles alone to Arizona to reconnect with his parents, who fled El Salvador years before after the country’s civil war.
Zamora recalls his experiences with the help of strangers along the way, including learning to raise himself and facing challenges from Border Patrol agents. “Solito” has been recognized as a New York Times Bestseller and as one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Public Library and as one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews, among other publications.
Thursday, May 5th, 2022 @ 7PM, Friends, Sonomans, and the culturally curious! Occidental Center for the Arts’ Literary Series is thrilled to present An Evening with Andrei Codrescu, star of page, screen, and NPR who will talk, read, and generally hold forth. Tickets $25 GA/ $20 for OCA Members. Ticketholders will receive a poem by Andrei Codrescu in a limited handset letterpress broadside edition of 100, designed and printed by Pat Nolan and Eric Johnson at North Bay Letterpress Arts Limited tickets available – get yours today! Refreshments for sale. OCA: 3850 Doris Murphy Way, Occidental, CA. OCA’s facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. For more info: occidentalcenterforthearts.org or 707-874-9392. Thank you for your continuing support of OCA by posting our listings.
Sunday, May 1st,@4 pm Occidental Center for the Arts’ Literary Series presents American Peace Gardens: A Memoir, 1996 to 2020 by Stephen C. Fowler. In August of 1996, Steve Fowler set out on an odyssey, gathering soils from organic farmers all across America in preparation for a ceremony, with Native American collaborators, on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The narrative of that adventure, and the personal challenges that led up to it, are the subject of this short book. The connection between peace work and farm practices is the main theme. Quixotic and quirky, this is the script of a work of performance art by an actor and poet (50 Cent Poems, 2017) who is a gardener by trade. Free admission, all donations gratefully invited. Refreshments for sale. Selected readings, Q&A, book sales (Hand assembled in loose-leaf binders; includes a 70 minute CD which contains 32 tracks, mostly interviews with farmers, plus a few musical interludes)& signing. OCA: 3850 Doris Murphy Way, Occidental, CA. OCA’s facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. For more info: occidentalcenterforthearts.org or 707-874-9392.
Sunday April 24th 4-5:30 Occidental Center for the Arts Literary Series presents artist Leeann Lidz. Adventures on the Gringo Trail: An Artist’s Awakening. In 1974, the author set off on a nineteen- month journey through Central and South America including the birth of her daughter in the Andean highlands of Ecuador. As an artist, she kept a journal of over 100 pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations of the places she visited: The unique story of her travels and evolution as an artist and mother living in Ecuador in a time before technology. Free admission, all donations gratefully invited. Slide show/Andean music with selected readings. Refreshments for sale. A Q&A, book sales & signing. OCA: 3850 Doris Murphy Way, Occidental, CA. OCA’s facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. For more info: occidentalcenterforthearts.org or 707-874-9392.
Sunday April 10th 4-5:30 pm Occidental Center for the Arts Literary Series. Local Author Michael David Fels’ Bodies in Motion: Short Trips in An Expanding Universe. A collection of first-person memoirs, an internal journey on the impact of movement/travel on the author, taking the reader to The Philippines, China, Dubai, Lebanon, Canada and Thailand as well as California, Kansas, New York, and New Mexico. Free admission, all donations gratefully received. Masking requested for unvaccinated. Selected readings, Q&A, book sales & signing. Refreshments for sale. OCA: 3850 Doris Murphy Way, Occidental, CA. OCA’s facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. For more info: occidentalcenterforthearts.org or 707-874-9392.
Welcome to May We Present…, a column from Lambda Literary that highlights authors with recent or forthcoming publications. This November, we’re featuring Nefertiti Asanti and their new poetry collection, fist of wind, published on October 29th by Foglifter Press. fist of wind centers the simultaneously magical and mortal Black body as a site of healing and transformation from pain, ranging from larger forms of structural, communal, and intergenerational pain to the personal pain of menstruation out of which the collection was born.
With fist of wind, Asanti became the first winner of the Start A Riot! Chapbook Prize, a prize for local emerging queer and trans Black writers, indigenous writers, and writers of color, created by Foglifter Press, RADAR Productions, and Still Here San Francisco. The win was well deserved, as fist of wind is a breathtaking and candid lyrical testimony, one that might be thought of as an exceptional exploration in translation. Asanti masterfully translates the physical into the textual and, through the reader, back into the physical again. Through bold engagement with form and space, Asanti translates the dynamic qualities of the spoken word into the written word without losing its sense of embodiment. Reading fist of wind becomes a transfixing, corporeal undertaking, one that everyone should experience at least once.
Below, Nefertiti Asanti elaborates on the most difficult tangible sensation to put into words, how poetry interacts with other forms of text, and the last thing she read that surprised her.
When did you realize you had to write fist of wind?
When I started writing toward fist of wind, I was actually writing toward stopping some pain. I was living alone in Brooklyn in a basement-level apartment I could barely afford after resigning from the first full-time job I’d ever had. I was living alone, and I was in pain, physical pain as a result of my period. I had cramps, debilitating cramps that demanded my attention once they hit and kept hitting.
One day it was just out of control—the pain was so uncomfortable and relentless and beyond me, something inside me was like, “This don’t belong to me; this ain’t mine,” so I prayed a spell into it. Eventually, the pain subsided and along with it went the idea of the pain being a singular thing that I owned, that owned me.
During that time, I wrote what I called “full moon lunes,” three-line, three-syllable, three-word per line poems that were prayers to my womb to welcome healing and expel the pain I’d absorbed from being Black and bleeding and alive and the un/healed histories of my ancestors, lineage, and community. As a person who absorbs so much of what’s around me, it was important that I let go of what I could in a form that echoed the physical boundaries pain can create and transcend them. At least two pieces in fist of wind are in lunes or borrow from the form. I wrote fist of wind because I wanted to have conversations with other Black people about periods and healing from violence, whatever the source.
Proust wrote “Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all our tears have run dry, can make us cry again!” The Perfume Thief by Timothy Schaffert offers a vivid and striking story that exemplifies this observation. A whiff of a scent conjures up an event in the past, transporting one to that moment where a smell becomes indelible in the catalog of one’s senses. In a novel imbued with deception hidden in plain sight, perfume emerges as the most powerful and truthful presence in this redolent tale of Nazi Occupied Paris during World War II.
It’s six months since the Nazis took over Paris. An American ex-pat lesbian, seventy-two-year-old Clementine, spends her days creating perfumes on the first floor of her house, formerly a school for young gentlemen, which serves as her laboratory and shop. At night, Clem dresses in her best menswear to move around the dingier side of Parisian nightlife. Accompanying Clem on her nightly excursions is Blue, named after his stunning blue eyes, a twenty-one-year-old gay Frenchman, who escaped his abusive uncle to find the school. Most nights Clem and Blue, in matching tuxedos, head to Madame Boulette’s, a brothel that hosts a lively and seedy cabaret. At Madame Boulette’s, they visit their friend, Day Shabillée, an American singer known for a sentimental hit twenty years ago.
As Clem’s reputation as a perfumer precedes her, Madame Boulette also hires our hero to produce signature fragrances for her girls. With a candid first-person voice, Clem’s empathy, tinged with cynicism, establishes itself in her relationships. Day summons Clem to Madame Boulette’s in hopes of convincing her to help her friend, Zoë St. Angel, the daughter of a famous Jewish perfumer, Monsieur Pascal.
… the novel evokes a tapestry of smells and their obscure origins. Paris is wistfully recalled through the scents of each character’s freedom before the war.
The Nazis have taken Pascal away and a superior intelligence officer, Oskar Voss, is ensconced in his house. Zoë receives a note from her father adorned with a special symbol which she knows is the key to finding her father’s perfume secrets, including the formula of the eponymous perfume he created for her. Faced with the reality of the Occupation, she wants to reconcile with her father after a seventeen-year absence. She asks Clem to help her find his book before it falls into Voss’s hands. Voss believes the diary contains a perfume recipe that can disguise the use of a fatal gas which he hopes will solidify his worth in Hitler’s estimation. Clem herself has an ulterior motive for finding Pascal’s book: she thinks it will confirm her suspicions that Pascal stole a perfume from her.
When Voss hears about Clem and her talent for recreating any scent, he orders her to his house so they can partner in the search for the book. Voss, close in age to Clem, flirts with her with invitations to parties and excursions including a grotesque free reign shopping spree in a department store housed with goods taken from the Jews of Paris. He finds Clem so enigmatic because she was mythologized in a tawdry exposé, The Perfume Thief, penned by a detective that spent his career chasing after her. Voss challenges her gender expression by sending over dresses for her to wear on their outings. Clem demonstrates her agility to code-switch as she strings Voss along with stories of her thieving escapades and revealing to him about the great love of her life, M. Clem learned from M about tea concoctions that elicit sickness. She uses this knowledge to make sachets “stitched together [from] a smoky blend of noxious herbs and pernicious weeds that would be fatal only to a kitten,” and passes them off to Voss as healing teas. What ensues is a high-stakes strategic and intellectual game of cat-and-mouse with consequences that could result in death for either of them. Their relationship is complicated further by their flourishing respect for each other’s survival skills.
As the novel pulses forward, the narrative is infused with impending danger as Clem struggles to protect everyone. Through interspersing chapters, Clem narrates the memories of her past triggered by her present life. Clem’s intelligent narrative voice and her upfront tone captivate with its honesty and acuity. Through Clem’s perspective, the novel evokes a tapestry of smells and their obscure origins. Paris is wistfully recalled through the scents of each character’s freedom before the war. As secrets and truths are revealed of all, the destiny of each character—and the choices they make—cause reverberations in the lives of the others.
Small acts of bravery during the Resistance may be less known, but this novel gives imagination to the courage of queer lives during the Occupation. Clem embodies the wisdom of a fully-rendered life, filled with deception, compassion, and transformation.
Small acts of bravery during the Resistance may be less known, but this novel gives imagination to the courage of queer lives during the Occupation. Clem embodies the wisdom of a fully-rendered life, filled with deception, compassion, and transformation. A luminous character invented to populate the queer history that was lost. Once she’s allowed herself to love others, she deceives one last time for those she loves.
The Perfume Thief
by Timothy Schaffert
Doubleday
Hardcover, 978-0385545747, 368 pp.
August 2021
Harriet M. Welch, the titular character of Louise Fitzhugh’s iconic children’s book Harriet the Spy is eleven years old and determined to write everything down. As training for one day becoming a famous novelist, she ventures on a daily “spy route,” stalking a handful of brownstones on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, secretly watching her friends and neighbors, chronicling their business in a private notebook using a tone so deadpan and factual it borders on cruel. Readers young and old, however, sixty years ago as much as today, find in Harriet a cathartic release and creative permission. Now Harriet’s author, Louise Fitzhugh, is the subject of a biography—Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy, a succinct and readable portrait of the short-lived and charismatic lesbian writer and illustrator.
A Queer Heroine in Childhood
With her matter-of-fact tone and acerbic humor, Harriet the Spy is the quintessential story of a tomboy—a queer heroine in childhood. Harriet is unstoppable: she eats cake and egg creams in the afternoons, argues with grown-ups, climbs onto buildings and into dumbwaiters to spy, all while filled with that kind of youthful rage one can only find in children. It is hard to tell whether Harriet’s influence on queer writers comes from her insufferable writing ambitions, her gender-agnostic bearings, or that she finds her world incomprehensible and repressive.
Much of the humor and intrigue of Harriet the Spy is the heroine’s own interior monologue, a relentless string of crude, or, as we say today, very real observations, externalized by the notes she takes: “DOES PINKY WHITEHEAD’S MOTHER HATE HIM?” She writes about a boy in her school, “IF I’D HAD HIM I’D HATE HIM.”
With her matter-of-fact tone and acerbic humor, Harriet the Spy is the quintessential story of a tomboy—a queer heroine in childhood.
Sometimes You Have to Lie
When Harriet’s classmates, without Harriet’s consent, obtain and read her notebook—which spells out PRIVATE on the cover—they are horrified and start a campaign against her. Following the lead of the school bullies, even Harriet’s closest friends turn on her. Finally, after bravely resisting mob rule, Harriet manages to make amends by following the advice of her beloved former nanny, who suggests using white lies to save Harriet’s friendships: “Sometimes you have to lie,” goes the moral truism of the novel, “but to yourself, you must always tell the truth.”
Published in 1964 into an undersaturated book market of children’s literature, Harriet the Spy’s idiosyncratic eleven-year-old protagonist instantly hit a nerve. The book spoke to its readers as complex people and not as inferior creatures, changing the tone and sophistication of children’s and young adult fiction for generations to come.
“Sometimes you have to lie,” goes the moral truism of the novel, “but to yourself, you must always tell the truth.”
A Kind of Detective Work
And yet Harriet’s popularity and household name eclipse that of her creator, whose larger-than-life persona remained out of the public eye. For the length of her career, Louise Fitzhugh minded her privacy. She never made public appearances or gave interviews to promote Harriet. After her sudden death, at forty-six, Fitzhugh’s estate and friends worked to retain Fitzhugh’s evasive nature according to their own terms. Only very few photographs were circulated of Fitzhugh: one, from the cover of Harriet the Spy, shows the intrepid Fitzhugh sitting on a swing with an unreadable, if mischievous expression. Even to children (or at least to the author of this text) she seemed somehow readably queer. Gamine, with short brown hair and lively, discerning eyes, the person depicted in this photograph was all that many of us ardent readers knew of her, including the fact that she was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1928.
Brody likens her biographical research to a kind of detective work, setting different chapters to key terms of “spy language,” using words like snoop and detect. The metaphor seems just a little too obvious: in order to reveal Fitzhugh’s hidden life, Brody had to do some sleuthing of her own. With Brody’s storytelling, Fitzhugh’s personality resonates distinctly, deliciously, to a degree that the reader falls in love with Fitzhugh as much as with the heroine of any good novel. Privacy, after all, does not equal shyness.
[..] the Fitzhugh that emerges comes across as a charmer, the kind of person you would want at your party, vibrant, contradictory, and extremely creative.
Quite the opposite actually: the Fitzhugh that emerges comes across as a charmer, the kind of person you would want at your party, vibrant, contradictory, and extremely creative. Wherever Brody’s research hits the sealed lips of former lovers or estates, the biographer leaves spaces alive and lets secrets and omissions speak for themselves—she paints a distinct enough character of Fitzhugh for the reader to fill in the blanks. What she does end up uncovering of Fitzhugh’s life story, Brody seems to suggest, like many queer histories, was never truly hidden. It was just kept slightly out of the spotlight of a hetero-centric world.
The Ultimate Resistance Facing a Hypocritical World
In the same way Louise Fitzhugh never appeared to be actively closeted—just simply never put in the limelight—so too are her politics of justice and resistance consistently overt. Harriet the Spy and her two best friends—wily Janie, an aspiring mad scientist, and gentle Sport, who looks after his bohemian father—can just as easily be read as queer by virtue of not behaving according to gender expectations. Beyond the obvious non-conformity Harriet displays in her behavior and attire (a tomboy of the mid-sixties, Harriet’s comfort clothes consist of sneakers, old jeans, and a hooded sweatshirt), she is an outspoken observer, the ultimate resistance facing a hypocritical world.
Her dilemma, or a good deal of it before the novel’s dramatic disaster strikes, consists of puzzling over how to fit into society and retain her dignity as a powerless eleven-year-old, but also in her identity as a spy. With the help of her nanny, Harriet devises ways of passing in straight society: she will, for instance, go to the revolting dance classes her mother wants her to attend, because spies, like Mata Hari, need to know how to dance in order to deceive people. Harriet needs to be a spy to fit into a world of dishonesty and deception while the rest of the world simply bows to injustice.
This unsentimental, humorous, and political attitude towards childhood runs through all of what is published of Louise Fitzhugh’s creative output: from her illustrations in the Eloise-parody Suzuki Beane (Fitzhugh drew the barmy ink illustrations featured in Harriet the Spy, as well) to the advocacy towards children’s political agency in Nobody’s Family is Going to Change, children strive for autonomy and fairness in Fitzhugh’s work.
Like several prolific female writers of the 20th century still known today, Louise Fitzhugh came from generational wealth that allowed for relative financial independence. And though she could live quite comfortably off her inheritance and royalties, Fitzhugh never turned her work away from people; instead, she fueled her writing with a subversive political will: “Her response to any kind of assertion of supremacy,” Brody writes, “was to oppose it.”
Liked to Consistently Reinvent Herself
Fitzhugh also liked to consistently reinvent herself and turn her own life into a tall tale. This comes to her biographer’s aid. Brody’s portrayal of Fitzhugh’s tempestuous life takes on the shape of those figures within 20th century literary genres where famous lesbian authors were starkly prevalent: Fitzhugh’s childhood, situated in what sounds like a gothic Memphis mansion, surrounded by an eccentric grandmother, a disturbed uncle living in the attic, various nannies, as well as a wealthy father extorting Fitzhugh’s working-class mother for money, recalls the kind of lonely child narrator by the likes of someone like Carson McCullers or Harper Lee.
Once Fitzhugh dropped out of Bard college to join her first girlfriend in bohemian 1950’s Greenwich Village, she resembled a pulpy heroine not unlike those by Ann Bannon and Vin Packer. Popular, charismatic, and energetic, Fitzhugh hung out in gay bars and galleries, painted and wrote, travelled to Europe, and entertained and collaborated with her long list of lovers as well as many well-connected friends. (Harriet the Spy’s neighbor and subject Harrison Withers lives with two dozen or so cats named after many of Fitzhugh’s close friends.)
Among these were the likes of Lorraine Hansberry and James Merrill, as well as pulp writers such Sandra Scoppetone (the author of Suzuki Beane), with whom Fitzhugh both collaborated and romanced, and through whom Fitzhugh befriended the grande dame of lesbian pulp fiction, Marijane Meaker—aka Vin Packer—who spent several years in a relationship with Patricia Highsmith, later penning a whole book about it.
Lost Manuscript
One of the more tragic and mysterious sections of the biography is the plot surrounding Louise Fitzhugh’s lost manuscript. The contents of this manuscript were rumored to be the re-telling of Fitzhugh’s first own secret teenage romance with another well-off Memphis girl, Amelia. Fitzhugh and Amelia had been each other’s first true loves in the South, later successfully eloping to New York to make it the home of their artistic pursuits. Amelia would become a reporter for the Times and a good friend of Fitzhugh’s, before her tragic and disturbing death in a freak accident. The manuscript containing the story of this teenage courtship, which some friends claim to have read excerpts of, would have been one of the first lesbian young adult novels ever published in the U.S.—years ahead of what is known of the first of its kind, Sandra Scoppettone’s Happy Endings Are All Alike (1978).
The existence of this manuscript, its content and disappearance, remain a mystery. It is possible Fitzhugh lost the manuscript by accident, or by her own mechanization? What would a book of Fitzhugh’s lost manuscript have looked like? Was it more literary than the lesbian pulp novellas of her day, or was it meant for a younger audience? Would it have been a kind of forerunner of historical young adult LGBTQ+ romance fiction, not unlike Malinda Lo’s recent, and powerfully moving, Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021)?
The manuscript containing the story of this teenage courtship […] would have been one of the first lesbian young adult novels ever published in the U.S.
The mysteries at the heart of this biography, alongside its depictions of various eras of queer literary New York City, only make for an even more compelling read. And Brody’s complex depiction of Fitzhugh, with her contradictions and idiosyncrasies, her tireless work and quest for artistic fulfillment, becomes a refreshing study of the arduous process and pay-offs of creativity itself: its fits, its dead ends, its blinding inspirations, leaving behind a vast and complicated legacy that might, in the end, emit one truly great achievement, a single character and her unforgettable name—Harriet the Spy.
Sometimes You Have to Lie
by Leslie Brody
Seal Press
Hardcover, 9781580057691, 352 pp.
December 2020
