“She just kept repeating, ‘I was a baby and they threw me on the couch.’” 1 Louise wouldn’t sit down, Joan later said. They’d known each other since childhood, but Joan had never seen her friend so angry and upset. Halfway through that hot afternoon, Louise slammed out of the newspaper offices and went straight to see her close friend Joan Williams. Finally, among the many boosterish articles recording her family’s tireless dedication to social uplift, she found a thick folder of clippings, photographs, and articles dedicated to her mismatched parents’ scandalous breakup in 1927-as lurid as the rest was dull. On her own in the newspaper morgue, she privately investigated.Īmong the archives, Louise found announcements of generations of her family’s births, graduations, and marriages along with records of their travels, land purchases, garden club leadership, Methodist affiliation, and history as benefactors of hospitals and colleges. For as long as she could remember, Louise had wanted to know more about her divorced parents’ early life and marriage, a secret subject that was hushed up at home. In September, she would escape to Bard College in New York State to study poetry and painting.įor part of that summer, Louise worked for the local newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, answering the phone and filing articles in the newspaper morgue, where all the issues of years past were indexed. Louise was bored in Memphis, sick to death of bigots and phonies, fed up with the way her more forward-looking ideals were routinely dismissed, and done with pretending to heed her father.

She was a smart, funny, and sometimes reckless girl, who had lately become particularly quarrelsome. She’d cut her hair short and still fit into the bib overalls she’d worn as a tomboy in grade school. In the summer of 1948, Louise Fitzhugh was nineteen years old and just about five feet tall.

Harriet the spy author