The subversive magic of moms and libraries—and "Harriet the Spy"

Plus my latest reading list

Harriet the Spy is the reason I’m a writer today. My hometown library was just three blocks down the street from our house, my parents were huge readers, and I can still conjure the smell of those long and musty manila card-filled drawers inside that cozy Tudor-style building.

Kansas artist Lora Jost created this illustration for a series of banned-book trading cards as a library fundraiser. Harriet is shown snooping on Harrison Withers, a man who makes beautiful birdcages out of wire and lives with 25 cats. Harrison intrigued Harriet because, though he was poor, he found happiness in art.

The library is the first place I remember walking to by myself, unless you count the time I ran away on my tricycle to the only other place I knew—the grocery store—where a neighbor lady found me chatting up the butcher and asking for a free popsicle. I was four.

The great librarian Linn Wilson turned me onto Louise Fitzhugh’s novel about a nosey truth-teller who carried a notebook wherever she went. On the block of factory-worker houses where we lived, I used to hide out in a wide stand of lilacs, eavesdropping on passersby and taking notes on their clothing and conversations a la Harriet.

So it ticked me off to learn that my favorite book was being targeted for book banning by the Trump administration and its “parents’ rights”-spouting ilk, including the recent removal of a Department of Education coordinator whose job was to investigate accusations of unlawful book removals.

Harriet was too subversive, her critics argued, and leaned toward “delinquent tendencies.” The boo-hoo book banners have also called her dangerously “abrasive,” because she’s a girl who has, you know, things to say. She is thoroughly herself—and therefore a threat to the kind of patriarchy where women and girls must operate under the control of a man’s thumb.

As a kid who exhibited her own delinquent tendencies, I knew instinctively that she was my kind of girl. “No more backtalk,” was a favorite complaint of my mother’s.

Libraries are among America’s best ideas, and that’s why I’ve been hitting them hard as I make my way across the CD-6 of Virginia in my quest to flip a red Congressional seat blue. For the past seven months, I’ve been campaigning in both iterations of the district, as we await a ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court on the legality of the voter-approved new maps. From Winchester to Harrisonburg to Roanoke County, I’ve given campaign stump speeches, raised money for Friends of the Library groups, and talked about my new book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America.

At a full house in South County Library in Roanoke, voters shared concerns about Medicare Advantage plans that take advantage of seniors, cuts to VA benefits, and winning back the House. Photo by Bob Schmucker.

I’ve discussed DOGE’s defunding of libraries (though thankfully that slashing was halted by the courts), how a record 5,668 books were banned in American libraries in 2025 alone, and about the outsized influence of libraries in rural communities like the one I’m from, where patrons get not only free reading materials but also harder-to-access internet services.

Last week, which was National Library Week, I was featured at Virginia’s flagship library, The Library of Virginia, where I spoke to 300 Richmonders. A few days later, I helped raise money for the Massanutten Regional Library in Harrisonburg.

A REALLY GOOD READER: Massanutten Regional Library trustee Rosalyn Kniss and her husband, Fred. Ros is a retired UVA Hospital division administrator—and, like me and Harriet, a great taker of notes. I love a Post-It! Photo by Tom Landon.

This Sunday, the journalist Brian Alexander and I will be in conversation about Paper Girl at the Columbus Metropolitan Library in Ohio—just an hour away from my hometown. (You can register here to attend.) Brian Alexander is one of the best sentence-writers anywhere, and his ability to embed in left-behind communities is unparalleled, whether it’s Bryan, Ohio, where his magisterial “The Hospital” was set, or Lancaster, Ohio, where he chronicled the last industrial throes of his hometown town in “The Glass House.” I’ve just started reading the advanced reading copy of his forthcoming “The Mayor,” about an unlikely leader trying to save the bankrupt city of Chester, Pa. (You can pre-order it here.)

And, no, it isn’t lost on me that I’m out campaigning to beat the MAGA congressman Ben Cline—who sends his kids to private school while voting with library- and public ed-gutting Donald Trump on every single issue—while stumping from the very spaces he hopes to erase.

My family and I will also gather this weekend to pay tribute to our feisty late mom, who frequented her local library sometimes twice a week, on the eve of what would have been her 99^th birthday. We’ll meet at the cemetery where she’s buried, restock the urns with annuals just like she taught us—a family tradition we call Decoration Day.

I don’t know what she’d think about my running for public office, but I hear her Harriet-like advice whenever I hit a snag on the road: “Whatever you do, just don’t take any crap.” So said the woman who supposedly eschewed backtalk.

• • • WHAT I’M READING AS OF LATE • • •

• This article, by Jared Abbott in The Jacobin, underscores why I support Medicare For All, which has the approval of roughly 55 percent of all Americans. Not long ago, my husband and I called around about buying health insurance on the ACA marketplace and were gobsmacked by a monthly premium quote of $2,200 a month.

M4A would allow seniors to age in place, it would be a balm to the 42 percent of Americans who are hammered by medical and dental debt, and the insurance industry would no longer be permitted to make you jump through onerous preauthorization hoops when you’re sick or use AI to deny your legitimate insurance claims. (That happened to me recently after getting a filling fixed—my dentist’s office called me back the following day for an X-ray to “prove” that my dentist had indeed fixed the filling!)

• When life is as harried and hair-graying as it’s been lately, I turn to fiction. Anna Quindlen’s new “More Than Enough” is a gripping, thoroughly satisfying take on enduring friendships, book clubs, aging, and generosity—all things I treasure more with each passing year, as I do my unlikely friendship with the inimitable AQ.

WHEN YOU’RE HEROES BECOME FRIENDS: Anna Quindlen (left), the Pulitzer-winning NYT columnist-turned novelist, has been my role model for decades. In a lean-in moment at Hollins University a few years back, I gave her an early copy of my first book, “Factory Man,” and we’ve been friends ever since.

• LOVE-OF-LETTER BOOKS: As someone who lives near the Appalachian Trail and loves to hike, I devoured “Heartwood” by Amity Gaige, a page-turner told via correspondence about a hiker who gets lost after wandering off the AT in Maine. Same with Virginia Evans’s epistolary “The Correspondent,” a novel told in letters by an extremely engaging retiree.

• I’ve gobbled up every crime novel by Lou Berney, and his latest, “Crooks,” was no different. The Mercurios are a notorious, multigenerational crime family whose eccentricities nail every gloriously off-key note.

• The publication of a new Tana French is always a celebratory event in my house, and I was thrilled to see the pre-order of “The Keeper” pop up in my audiobook queue. As a New York Times reviewer put it, “I would crawl across a field of glass to get my hands on a new Tana French book.”

• I would crawl on my belly like a snake to read the forthcoming Maggie O’Farrell book, “Land,” but I’m glad I don’t have to. It’ll be released June 2.

• Bonus picture and spelling schmelling: I loved meeting this group of local moms who advocate for gun-safety measures and was especially smitten by their kids’ campaign posters. Zoom in to read the one on left: “I bevlin in you.”

I bevlin in you, too, Tully!

Don’t stop bevlin, y’all.