“When her painting career had faltered, she had needed to make money.B ring up Harriet the Spy at any queer gathering and you’ll hear at least a few happy shouts of appreciation. The success of “Harriet the Spy,” published in 1964, when Fitzhugh was in her mid-30s, would grant the author freedom, but “she was practical enough to recognize that the first impulse had been commercial,” Brody writes.

“Her allowance had become an embarrassing symbol to her of failed promise, despite all advantages, to succeed on her own terms,” Brody writes. Years later, when her stepmother died and left Fitzhugh more wealth, it further tied her lifestyle to the Memphis society she had rejected. After college and a European sojourn studying art, Fitzhugh was able to lead an artist’s life in New York thanks to an inheritance she received from her paternal grandmother, with her father doling out installments. A fan of Russian fiction, Millsaps Fitzhugh had informed his daughter that “any literary work that wasn’t Tolstoy was hardly worth the trouble,” and such views long influenced her. Her tyrannical father back in Memphis loomed over Fitzhugh. And Harrison Withers, the bird cage designer with a skylight big enough for Harriet to spy through, cares for 26 cats whose names include not just Fitzhugh’s preferred literary luminaries (Thomas Wolfe, Dostoevsky, Faulkner) but also some of her close friends (Alex, Sandra, Marijane).

The therapist who helps Harriet through that loss may draw from Bertram Slaff, a psychiatrist whom Fitzhugh saw during her years living in New York City, where she pursued love and ambition as a gay artist enmeshed in a network of “successful, creative, pleasure loving, ambitious, knowledgeable lesbians,” as one friend described her circle. Ole Golly, the beloved nanny whose departure from the Welsches’ Manhattan home is the organizing trauma of “Harriet the Spy,” is probably an amalgamation of the nannies Fitzhugh knew growing up in a Memphis mansion during the Great Depression, pampered in isolation. In her new biography of Fitzhugh, “Sometimes You Have to Lie,” Leslie Brody identifies parallels between the author’s life and art, delightful details for fans of Fitzhugh’s creations.

Harriet the spy book