ALL WRITERS ARE SPIES: by Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop

ALL WRITERS ARE SPIES:

by Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop

I didn’t read Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh until I was trying to land a job as an editorial assistant in the children’s book department at Harper and Row Publishers. I read my way through every novel they’d published in the previous twenty years. Harriet was at the top of the list.

I recognized my kinship to Harriet the moment she told Sport in the first chapter that she has to take notes on the people in the subway because she’s seen them, and she wants to remember them. How did Louise Fitzhugh know me so well? The answer, of course, is simple: she was a writer. All writers are spies, going about the very important task of gathering their material, and when they’re on the job, they’re unsentimental, focused, indefatigable. “Spies don’t go with friends,” Harriet tells Sport. The life of a spy is a lonely one. I was the only girl in a family of six. I knew about being different, being on the outside looking in. Writing things down in my journal was my way of making sense of the world, from the confusing behavior of my parents to the cruelty of certain people who called themselves my friends to the irritating torments of my brothers. My journal was the one place where I could be completely honest about my feelings.

I was more careful than Harriet. I never took my spy books out of their secret, locked place in my bedroom, so fortunately, I didn’t lose any friends over what I wrote there. However, as my notes grew into published stories, a few family members began to have their misgivings. Soon after my second novel was published, one uncle warned that “every time Elizabeth writes a book, it’s like dodging a bullet.”

But I connected with Harriet in other ways. I realize now that when I came to write my fantasy novel, The Castle in the Attic, fourteen years after I’d read Harriet the Spy, I was channeling a version of Harriet’s nanny, Ole Golly. Harriet is devastated by Ole Golly’s departure. My character, William, feels equally desperate when he learns that his nanny, Mrs. Phillips, is moving back to England. Harriet works through her feelings in her notebook. William resorts to magic, but their motivation is the same: hang on to the one person who loves you despite all your faults. Do anything to keep her, and if she leaves you, do anything to bring her back, no matter the consequences.

Not unlike Harriet’s friend Janie Gibbs, who cheerfully mixes potions in her bedroom and makes dire threats against all adults, my oldest brother, Joe, loved blowing things up in a lab he’d set up in our basement. One time, he got too close to his own explosive mixture and had to be taken to the hospital. When Joe decided it wasn’t feasible to blow up his hated boarding school, he wired the headmaster’s office instead, so he could tape the faculty meetings. He was eventually discovered and expelled, but we younger siblings, sworn to secrecy, never betrayed him.

Joe always gave us hope that in the battle between children and adults, we might actually triumph. We six were all spies, but I was the Harriet in my family, the one who took the notes and turned them into stories.

When I first started interviewing my mother about her time working as a decoding agent for MI5 during the war in London, I thought it might turn into a novel or at the very least, a way of recording her story for the family. My father, the journalist Stewart Alsop, had written his own memoir, Stay of Execution, and books and plays had been written about him. But nobody knew my mother’s story, least of all me. 

My father, an American captain in the Office of Strategic Services, fell in love with the British girl 12 years his junior because she didn’t babble and chatter like the Long Island debutantes of his youth. As clandestine operatives during the war in England, these two fell into the habit of keeping secrets from one another and it was only in doing the research for what turned into my memoir, Daughter of Spies, that I came to realize how deeply that secrecy was embedded in their marriage. My father kept the secrets of the cold war Washington power brokers who came and went through our living room door, and my shy young mother kept her own secrets, especially her increasing dependence on drink to dull the terror she felt when she might find herself sitting next to one of those same power brokers at dinner.

No wonder my brothers and I did all we could to discover the secrets our parents were keeping. Joe used electronics and I, like Harriet, used words. 

—

Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop’s memoir, Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies has just been released by Regal House. As Elizabeth Winthrop, she has published over 50 works of fiction for readers of all ages. These include the award-winning fantasy series, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle as well as the short story, The Golden Darters, read on the nationwide radio program, Selected Shorts, and included in Best American Short Story anthology. You can find her online at www.elizabethwinthropalsop.com, on Facebook and Instagram. 

 

Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop is the author of DAUGHTER OF SPIES: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies (October 25, 2022; Regal House Publishing), as well as more than sixty works of fiction. You can visit her online at elizabethwinthrop.com.

https://www.facebook.com/ElizabethWinthropAuthor

https://www.instagram.com/winthrop.elizabeth/

Twitter: @EWinthropAlsop

Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies 

As a child, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, along with her five brothers, was raised to revere the tribal legends of the Alsop and Roosevelt families. Her parents’ marriage, lived in the spotlight of 1950s Washington where the author’s father, journalist Stewart Alsop, grew increasingly famous, was not what either of her parents had imagined it would be. Her mother’s strict Catholicism and her father’s restless ambition collided to create a strangely muted and ominous world, one that mirrored the whispered conversations in the living room as the power brokers of Washington came and went through their side door.

Through it all, her mother, trained to keep secrets as a decoding agent with MI5, said very little. In this brave memoir, the author explores who her mother was, why alcohol played such an important role in her mother’s life, and why her mother held herself apart from all her children, especially her only daughter. In the author’s journey to understand her parents, particularly her mother, she comes to realize that the secrets parents keep are the ones that reverberate most powerfully in the lives of their children.

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