South Florida Sun-Sentinel Personal Finance Column

Aug. 2--Before she was Dawn Summers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Georgina Sparks on Gossip Girl, Michelle Trachtenberg was Harriet M. Welsch in Harriet the Spy. And before Harriet the Spy was a 1996 film, it was a not just one of the greatest books ever written, but the kind of book that, if you read and loved it in your childhood, immediately bonds you to others who did, too, to the point that you sort of lose respect for any woman who did not devour the novel a minimum of seven times.

Published in 1964 by Louise Fitzhugh, who died a decade later of a brain aneurysm at age 46, Harriet the Spy is about a stubborn, smart, decidedly unfeminine adolescent girl who lives in a Manhattan townhouse and is generally ignored by her parents. She has a close if unconventional relationship with her nanny, Ole Golly (played, somewhat incongruously in our opinion, in the movie by Rosie O'Donnell), and spends the vast majority of her time spying on neighbors, classmates and complete strangers. Lessons are eventually learned, but not in some goopy, melodramatic manner; Fitzhugh's writing is as fiercely intelligent as Harriet herself. At least, that's how it was in the book. Frankly, we've never seen the movie. That would be sacrilege. But that's just us.