“First she went to the bathroom because she hadn’t in the morning, and when she was sitting there she wrote in her notebook:
I LOVE MYSELF
Then she got up and put on her spy clothes.”

The presence of a notebook or diary in my life has been a constant since childhood. I can trace it back to my love for Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, that classic romance between a girl and her notebook, first published in 1964. Who knows how old I was when I read it. I think 12. Twelve feels right. By then I would have also read Little Women and deemed Jo March ingenious for selling her hair. I had definite ideas about who or what I wanted to be: airplane hostess, artist, vet, archeologist, writer. Or all of the above.

Nearly every woman writer I know has a place for Harriet in her heart, for Harriet M. Welsch writes with the confidence of a middle-aged white man, that is to say she has no fear of judgement. She would never be laid low by imposter syndrome. Harriet is so absorbed in her writing – her WORK – that she doesn’t even realise she’s an outsider, and when she does find out, she doesn’t entirely care. As a child I admired her focus and her orneriness. How fun, to go around being disagreeable, to hide in dumbwaiters and be your own Neighbourhood Watch, eye-rolling at the ridiculous adults. I also loved Harriet’s friends in their subverted gender roles: Sport, whose pulp writer-father’s neglect forces him to manage the household, and Janie, who aspires to blow up the school.

When Harriet and Janie’s mothers tried to force the girls to go to dancing classes I joined in their scorn. Mrs Gibbs tells Harriet that her mother is worried about the way she moves, and Harriet replies: “Fast, that’s the way I move, fast. What’s wrong with that?” I was fast too, and I loved it. When I was 12 there was no better feeling than being ahead. It didn’t come often, but when it did, it was empowering.

In the second half of the 20th century, Harriet’s creator, Louise Fitzhugh, was part of a smart, queer, literary set that hung around New York’s “Green Witch” Village and included writers Marijane Meaker (M.E Kerr), and Sandra Scoppettone. The Fitzhugh and Scoppettone collaboration Suzuki Beane, (1961) a beatnik parody of Eloise, characterises the anarchic wit of their social group: they were renegade ladywriters, hiding in plain sight, the city as their playground; not for them the drudge of suburbia or the dreaded pram in the hallway. Marijane Meaker shared stories with Fitzhugh about her childhood habit of spying, and, after Harriet, accused her of stealing her story. Fitzhugh responded with the universal truth: “all kids are spies when they’re little.”

Fitzhugh grew up in the South, an only child, rich and alienated. At the age of two her “country gentleman” father finagled custody, telling her that her “flapper” mother was dead. Fitzhugh’s mother took to haunting the places her daughter might be found. She was eventually allowed back into her life, but never quite to the degree that she wanted.

Fitzhugh didn’t want to be a debutante. She abhorred the racial inequality that surrounded her. At nine, she acquired a sketchbook and from then on dragged it everywhere. Seeing herself as an artist was a response to her locative and emotional dissonance. Escape came via college. Her adviser at Bard, the poet James Merrill, remembered Fitzhugh as “a bright, funny, tiny tomboy from Memphis”. Leslie Brody, in her biography of Fitzhugh, Sometimes You Have to Lie, writes: “In self-portraits Fitzhugh would draw herself as a lost little boy, or as a comic sort of goblin, or a dumpty middle-aged woman resigned to her fate. It isn’t fair to say that’s how she always saw herself, but gives a hint.”

I did not grow up rich or an only child, but I definitely felt “different” and also thought of art as the antidote to the straight life that seemed to be the only option on offer. The illustration of Harriet in her spy outfit: turned-up jeans, hoodie, fake glasses and toolbelt, imprinted on me to the extent that in my teen years I would inhabit it as my own style with a few modifications: blue jeans, white T-shirt and a gentleman’s vest. But I’m jumping ahead. What Harriet’s outfit meant to me at 12 was this: self-suffiency, capability and ingenuity. And even to a dud ballerina and a bad Brownie, these were attractive traits.