Previous installments of Jaya Catches Up can be found here.
This book was everywhere in my elementary school classrooms, and I think the reason I didn’t read it is that I knew I would never say the title correctly. If someone asked me what I was reading I would have announced “The Messed-Up Files of Mrs. Franken E. Hossenfeffer” or some bullshit, and I was not about to ruin my reputation as “child who can definitely read” to die on that hill. But now I have an English degree and some Twitter followers so Mrs. Bandy E. Frankensifter or whatever can just sit the fuck down and get read.
I admit that I am predisposed to like this book, in which two siblings run away from their home in Connecticut to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan in the 1960s. My elementary school was two blocks away from that museum. In fifth grade, when they finally let us go out by ourselves for lunch (“finally” omg we were ten), my friends and I would grab bagels or pizza or hot dogs and sit on the museum steps and watch people go in and out. Like Gossip Girl, but if everyone wore Looney Toons shirts. The museum’s proximity also made it the main destination for our school trips — I probably sketched the Temple of Dendur at least eight times in my grade school years. So this book is set in my world.
It’s written as a letter from Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to her lawyer, whom she seems to both hate and pity, describing how two children managed to end up in her will. Claudia, the main character, is twelve years old and bored as hell (if you’ve been to Connecticut, you know this is an accurate way to feel), and decides to run away to the most glamorous place she can think of. She takes her little brother Jamie because he is good with money, and she knows enough about herself to know that her expensive taste could get her in trouble. The book immediately takes children seriously, presenting them as inexperienced, sure, but clearly capable of understanding their own strengths and weaknesses. This book doesn’t talk down.
Of course, Claudia has expensive taste because she’s a bit of a spoiled brat, but not because she’s well-off. It’s because she’s never wanted anything. Part of this, surely, is because she has never wanted for anything, but twelve is around the age that many of us become uncomfortable with whatever our lives have been ump to that point. It’s the age when you become more aware of boredom, and start to feel unappreciated, even though you rarely have any qualities to appreciate. (I know, I know, all children are miracles, but I don’t think you get the privilege of being “appreciated” by the world at large if all you do is go to school and make your bed for your fifty-cent allowance.) Claudia knows there are things to want out there, and she wants to find them — she’s just been given limited tools to work with.
So she and Jamie hide on the school bus, get on the train, and find their way to the Met, where they stash their stuff in some sarcophagi and wait for dark by hiding in bathrooms and under antique beds, all according to the plan Claudia has been crafting for months. They blend in with school groups by day (because they do like learning, they just don’t like being told how and when to do it) and bathe in the cafeteria fountain by night, and occasionally leave the museum to eat mac and cheese or wash the clothes they’ve stuffed in their pockets. All in all, they are living their best lives.
I’ve found that I am attracted to children’s books in which guardians do not matter. As they spend just over a week away from home, there are hints to what must be happening in Connecticut. Claudia flips past an article in the Times about their parents’ frantic search, and when they finally meet the titular Mrs. Frankweiler, she vaguely mentions that their parents must be hysterical. They seem to have honestly not thought of it, in the way most children do not think of their parents — not because they are mean or inconsiderate, but because they know they’re fine, so why wouldn’t everyone else know? They’ve spent the week learning about ancient Egypt and Renaissance painting while keeping themselves bathed and fed. I know adults who could only aspire to a life like that.
Early into their stay at the Met, Claudia finally finds something to desire: the Angel statue that’s just gone on display, rumored to be a work of Michelangelo’s although the art world is still debating its origins. She becomes obsessed with it, and now her mission to run away and have an adventure becomes a mission to solve the mystery of Angel, who Claudia even begins to believe she resembles. It’s another manifestation of the meaning she’s looking for. Here’s this enigma of a statue, which people across the city line up to see every day, and they can only guess at its true story. Claudia, on the other hand, is a known quantity, a rich child from the Northeast; she doesn’t have the luxury of anyone trying to figure her out.
At first it seems the book is going to turn into a child-detective novel, with Claudia and Jamie discovering the “M” imprint the statue leaves behind on its velvet pedestal, and their certainty that this will be the clue to crack the case. But that would have been too easy and too childish, and the letter they send to the curators is returned with the news that of course expert curators thought to flip the statue over in the course of verifying its authenticity. So, after a week of hiding out with no more leads, Claudia decides they need to go to the source: the house of the donor, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
But first, a racist interlude, because no children’s book should stay un-ruined. This comes from the section in which the kids spend some time on a tour of the United Nations, trying to figure out what their next move is:
Despite the appalling idea that “saris are a way of being different” and not, you know, the traditional dress of a few countries that have far more people than America, I get what Claudia is going for here, because it’s what she’s going for when she runs away in the first place. Our middle school fashion choices and associations are rarely about making us interesting to other people — they’re about making us interesting to ourselves. It’s what you do when you realize you’re the same as everyone else around you because you’ve all had the same input for the past twelve years, and you won’t get the opportunity to really differentiate yourself for another twelve. So you declare yourself to be the boy-who-always-wears-a-tie or the girl-who-ran-away, just so in those moments when you feel restless and remember just how ordinary you are, you can claim one superficial bit of personality. Superficial differentiation is all you have, and by god you will use it, dreaming of the day when a better way to do things comes along. Not that you should be doing this by playing cultural dress-up, but I feel ya.
This is what Claudia fears when she expresses the need to return home “different,” and in her need to discover the true origins of Angel. She needs something more than the superficial differentiation — not for anyone else, just for herself. She needs to go to bed knowing she’s grown, and on her own terms, because the other terrifying part of being twelve is knowing a massive and uncontrollable change is on the way, or is already happening. I remember reacting to this strangely in my own life, at once trying to hold onto bits of childhood while convincing my parents that I could also be treated like an adult. One time, for instance, I ordered a bacon cheeseburger, and when my dad commented on my order, I said: “I figure soon I’ll be worried about my weight, so I might as well get one while I don’t care.” At that age you know what’s about to happen, and you want to take a stand for something before your body and your mind start to change without your permission.
The idea of having something that only you are in control of is something Mrs. Frankweiler understands, and refers to as the need for a “secret.” Also — surprise! — she has one of her own.
The kids arrive at Mrs. Frankweiler’s house and she pretty much acts like she’s been expecting them, letting them take baths in her black marble tubs (what I wouldn’t give for a tacky black marble bathroom) and hang out instead of calling the police and/or their parents. The kids then discover, after being sent on a scavenger hunt in Mrs. Frankweiler’s files, that she does indeed know the true origins of the statue, and she agrees to leave proof to the children in her will if they promise to keep the secret. Which is why she’s writing to her lawyer (who turns out to be the children’s grandfather??? What is this about?) in the first place.
While reading this book, I kept thinking of a part from Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk With Me, when he talks about falling in love: “Deep down, our whole lives, no matter how low our self-esteem gets, we think, ‘I have secret special skill that no one knows about and if they knew they’d be amazed.’ And then eventually we meet someone who says,‘You have a secret special skill.’ And you’re like, ‘I know! So do you!’ And they’re like, ‘I know!’” But before you want to share that secret skill of yours, the thing that makes you special even when you don’t feel special, you have to realize it exists in the first place. It’s more than learning to love yourself; it’s first learning that you are an alive and valid and capable human, with interests and opinions and personality quirks that make you whole. You have to remember that you’re a person, not another body in ruffled socks and a headband following a teacher around a museum. This book is about that powerful moment when a girl realizes she exists.
Tags: books, childhood, jaya catches up, jaya saxena, nostalgia
God, I think of that book every time I stand on the seat in a toilet stall.
Me, too.
Also every time people come to my workplace and ask me if I live at the museum, because I’m the full-time admissions desk person. Or it’s kids who still haven’t grown beyond that teachers-only-exist-at-school thing.
God, I loved this book. When I was about twelve I went on a class field trip to the Field Museum in Chicago, with its pleasantly dark and cool hallways that all smelled vaguely smoky and mothball-y, and I crept around the taxidermied animals and the reproduced Native American longhouse (I think it was a longhouse–it has been many years) and thought to myself that I could make quite a nice life for myself there.
But I also thought the same thing about Colonial Williamsburg, so I don’t know. At the same age I was fixing myself bagels with BBQ sauce and American cheese in the microwave, so I think my capacity for taking care of my self was far below where I imagined it was, but this entire book was PHENOMENAL for dreaming out a new life for myself.
This book is so good, for REAL. To this day whenever I pass the Stamford stop on Amtrak, I think That’s where Claudia and Jamie lived! I still reread it every few years; it holds up remarkably well.
Due to this book and The Boxcar Children (I think?), I thought several Connecticut towns were fictional and was AMAZED when my family drove through Stamford.
The Babysitter’s Club lived in Connecticut too, and I had this same issue!
But I LOVED this book so, so much when I was young. I have such vivid memories of the descriptions of how they found the money in the fountain and how they hid in the bathrooms. I may have to go find it and re-read it.
Stamford is a real place????
It’s true, you do learn something new every day.
this is such lovely commentary, jaya!
loved this book as a child and still reread it every few years. i reread it earlier this year, right before i went to the met for the first time.
I loved this book so much as a kid. It’s been years since I read it but it may be time for a re-read. I think it’s one of the ones that will stand up well to age.
My sixth-grade class took a field trip to the Met when I was in the sixth grade and I thought many, many times about hiding behind some statue or something so I could re-enact this book. I loved it SO MUCH. Combine this with all of those Anastasia books from the Link Roundup this morning and The Phantom Tollbooth and you have my childhood library in a nice tidy package. SO MUCH RE-READING TO DO!
This is beautiful and commentary is so, so on point.
This book! This book is so important to me, for all the above reasons, and more. It is pretty much the mainstay of any “favorite books” lists (everything else tends to change), and if I really, really like a guy, I give it to him so he can better understand me. Or at least part of me.
Which is all to say, this is a lovely write-up, thank you.
Like Gossip Girl, but if everyone wore Looney Toons shirts.
For any TV executives who may be reading this, I would like to point out that this would be a FANTASTIC show. All it needs is occasional anvils being dropped on characters’ heads. Bonus points if there is no plot reason for the falling anvils.
SPOT ON.
I think in many ways this is a book about the joys of feeling competent.
There was a year when I worked a catering job that sent me to museums and event spaces around the Manhattan. It was a great, flexible job, though an exhausting one, and I got some solid stories out of it along with the frustration. My sense of self was like a burned piece of toast at that point, so I spent a lot of time staring at musty dioramas in the Natural History Museum thinking ruefully about the Catcher in the Rye. Whenever I went to the Met I’d wander through the furniture and think about the Mixed-Up Files in turn, wondering what had happened to all my Claudia-like promise and feeling unappreciated. Which, in hindsight, is pretty funny, because that’s precisely the sort of existential drama that a Claudia in her twenties would have.
Always such gorgeous commentary- I don’t think the instinct for sizing up museum beds and plinths and sarcophagi as potential hiding places ever really leaves you.
I loved the heck out of this book as a kid, but please allow me to advance a word for Konigsberg’s A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, which was only my absolute favorite book as a child.
A PROUD TASTE FOR SCARLET AND MINIVER RULED AND ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE IS SUCH A MISANDRIST INSPIRATION
I really need to read it! I picked it up at a library sale a few years ago and it’s sitting sadly on my bookshelf with the other books from that day, asking me why I haven’t made time for them yet.
Do itttttttttttttt
Yes, it is SO GOOD.
THAT BOOK IS SO IMPORTANT
YES. yes. Yes. My favorite book in middle school. I checked it out from the school library 10 consecutive times. That is not an exaggeration. Eleanor of Aquitaine is responsible for 75% of my adult personality.
I read this book as an adult too and hearted it hard.
Oh my gosh, Jaya, I’m so glad you covered this one. I’ve never met another person who has read Mixed-Up Files. We share the same attraction to “children’s books in which guardians do not matter”–you hit the nail on the head there. Books like that allow child readers, particularly the ones who feel as if they have no influence over events in their own lives (*ahem* me), to imagine that they could have the same independence and competence if they were only allowed to make a decision once in a while.
My favorite game as a child was “running away”. I’d spend HOURS elaborately packing a bag with snacks and supplies and planning where to run away to. Sometimes it was the basement, sometimes the attic, and once or twice my little brother and I actually made it outside. We liked home, but the idea of leaving was undeniably romantic. The Boxcar Children, The Goats, everything by Diana Wynne Jones, yeah. Yeah.
Oh, I also loved playing “running away” – Island of the Blue Dolphins, Boxcar Children, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and Mixed-Up Files were my guidebooks for Running Away. The planning and packing was THE BEST.
(Also bonus points to The Egypt Game for the add-on of building a temple in the corner of the back yard to which one Ran Away.)
I need to re-read this, immediately, because all the feelings it gave me as a kid are present again… kinda I went to the Met the first time earlier this year and my heart caught in my throat.
I was at the Met just last weekend, and shamelessly teared up in front of a museum guard (who was really quite sweet about the whole thing) when I turned a corner and found THE BED (or what I think is the bed) from Mixed-up Files. It’s real!
I respected this book when I read it at the age of 10. It was really practical about running away (or it seemed practical to 10-year-old me) and I spent a lot of time as a kid daydreaming about practical ways to run away.
I’m so glad you wrote about this book, Jaya. I’m gonna go buy a copy for my kid now.
Yayyyyyy I love this book. It’s an all-time favorite. I am 40 years old and I own two copies and reread it about once a year. I was planning to make a “What Would Claudia Kincaid Do?” t-shirt at one point. And the first time I went to the Met Museum (sorry, I’m a singer, “The Met” is the opera) at 23 or so all I could think about was this book.
And now looking at all these other comments, I can’t believe I haven’t read any of Konigsberg’s other books! That is at odds with my m.o. as a kid, which was normally to bomb through an author’s entire output if I liked one book.
I thought proudly of this book when I got my first bus pass, and guiltily of it when I used to steal money from the fountain at my community college to do laundry. It gave a country mouse courage to see a little girl with such advanced life skills. Thanks for this lovely reminder to read it again (and notice the douchey parts this time).
As a kid I read My Side of the Mountain, Hatchet, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Julie of the Wolves, and then, suddenly and beautifully I found what I was looking for in this book. I wanted very badly to be self-sufficient, as a kid, but I knew the wilderness wasn’t for me. (I am allergic to most plants.) This book was the perfect running-away fantasy for me, where I could imagine escaping from home without having to leave behind beds or art. If I had been aware that New York was not, in fact, a fictional location, I think I would have been in some real danger of buying myself a one-way bus ticket.
There’s a line from this book I think of all the time…I remember that it’s something Claudia’s brother says to her about how she’s never satisfied…something about like “When you get A’s you wonder where are the pluses.” I also remember really identifying with Claudia’s desire to run away in comfort and style. She talks about how even picnics were too messy and inconvenient for her and even at 10 I was like “YES, thank you!” Here’s to adventurous girls who also want to be comfortable.
Thank you so much for a wonderful commentary. I have a very worn and tattered paperback copy signed by the author that is one of my most treasured possessions. I nearly wore out the spine as a 12 and 13 year old rereading it. 🙂
This is just, thank you, Jaya. As a child (oh hell, still now) I loved any book with a preteen, female, bookish protagonist. Transparent, I know. Claudia Kincaid, Laura Ingalls, Beezus Quimby, Matilda, you have my <3.
That bathtub went on my list of adult goals twenty years ago and I still want it. Gold dragon head spigot and all.
I picked up a copy of—the same paperback version we had in during my childhood!—used for a dollar a few years ago. It lives on the bathroom shelf with my bath salts and oils, so I can read it while I’m soaking in the bath after a hard day. But it was only in the last year that I realized one of my modest life goals comes from Mixed-Up Files.
I have always wanted to dine in an automat. (I know, right?) Always have, since I was a kid. And last year, I realized it’s because of Claudia and Jamie, who leave the museum a handful of times to type their letter, to pick up a newspaper, and to eat—yes—at Horn & Hardart’s, paying with change they’ve scavenged from the fountain floor.
There was so much mingled freedom and security in that idea: running away from home to the safety of a museum, sleeping—clean and fresh from your fountain bath—in a royal bed, staying well-fed but choosing everything about your day, right down to selecting your dishes from the automat doors without some waiter—some ADULT—second-guessing you whether you’re allowed to have coffee, whether you shouldn’t have fruit, whether you really want that macaroni and cheese.
YES. yes. Yes. My favorite book in middle school. I checked it out from the school library 10 consecutive times. That is not an exaggeration. Eleanor of Aquitaine is responsible for 75% of my adult personality.
One of the most fun things about being a book-loving parent is getting to read aloud books I’d previously only read to myself. Mixed-Up Files is a GREAT read-aloud book. Claudia and Jamie have such distinct voices, and Mrs. Frankweiler’s salty asides are brilliant. I think I enjoyed reading it to my daughter more than I enjoyed reading it as a child, which is saying a lot, because it gave me the life goal of living in the Met when I was a kid.
Lovely review.
(The inilne image at the bottom of the first page is not loading for me, however.)
Yeah, Silent to the Bone probably needs a warning for child abuse. The plot kind of revolves around a baby that was shaken into a coma (that's not a spoiler at all, by the way). But it's fantastic.
And I'll add my vote for View From Saturday. Besides the fact that it's just wonderful all around, it taught me that being into nerdy things like Academic/Knowledge Bowl was kinda cool sometimes.
Her death was one of the first that really hit me hard.
One summer, I was in high school and my sister, 7 years my junior, and I were given money to go to the Science Museum of Minnesota to see an exhibit on Jurassic Park. We were to take the bus there and back, but we didn’t have enough money to pay for the special exhibit and also take the bus home. I knew how to handle this problem, no, not by calling our parents to come get us. So we went to the museum, then afterwards we went to the indoor park a few blocks away that was fun of fountains. I set my sister as lookout, and climbed into the fountains to scrounge enough quarters for the bus home. It totally worked.
We only confessed that we did that a few years ago.
Thanks, Claudia and Jamie!
Everyone who loves this book, and E.L. Konigsburg, should read “The View From Saturday” — I never read it as a child, but I read it as an adult a few years ago and it is so good. It holds up the same way Mixed-Up Files does.
Oh, this book! I still remember the scene where they’re picking coins out of the fountain so they can buy something to eat. And the hiding in the bathrooms! And the giant Elizabethan(?) bed they sleep in! It’s probably a very good thing that Baltimore, where I grew up, was too far from New York for me to consider following Claudia’s plan myself.
This was one of my books. I would reread it a lot when I was a girl. I always envied that they slept in those fancy beds. I loved reading running away from home and making it on your own books.
This was one of my books. I would reread it a lot when I was a girl. I always envied that they slept in those fancy beds. I loved reading running away from home and making it on your own books.
So much love for this book.
(The cat was wearing tiny gold earrings and looked a trifle less smug…)
(“I’ll eat [the note]. I like complications.” / “You must also like wood pulp.”)
So much love for this book.
(The cat was wearing tiny gold earrings and looked a trifle less smug…)
("I'll eat [the note]. I like complications." / "You must also like wood pulp.")
I know! I was so upset when I learned she had passed THE VIEW FROM SATURDAY was one of my favorite books growing up.