Brody-working with interviews given by various friends of Fitzhugh’s-links her death on November 19, 1974, to the middling reviews that Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change received that fall. Brody’s account of the novel relies heavily on generational analysis she sees Harriet the Spy as a prototypical Baby Boomer text, a 'countercultural' story that questions authority, and she-like many other critics-presents the novel instrumentally, as a tool that readers can use to do something else with. The stories that Brody is able to tell the reader, then, are mostly second- or third-hand, conveyed to her by friends as they reminisced after Fitzhugh’s death or by the handful of enterprising earlier writers who attempted to crack the nut of Fitzhugh’s life. But Fitzhugh herself left few personal papers: she didn’t write a lot of letters, and the small number of journals she kept continue to be held closely by the estate.
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