Name: James Tiptree, Jr.
ISBN: 9780312203856

Julie Phillips

Profiles the successful woman author who hid behind the male pen name of James Tiptree, Jr., to publish short works of science fiction in the 1970s, describing her work as an intelligence officer during World War II and her shocking suicide.

The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

James Tiptree, Jr.

Lindy

Julie Phillips has managed to write a biography consisting of 400 pages of single spaced, dense text and I did not feel as if it dragged. That in and of itself is a tremendous achievement. In particular, the portions that went into Tiptree's correspondences with Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin are absolute gold. 

However, there are several aspects to Sheldon's life that Phillips seems to glance over, and I suspect she does so because she finds them uncomfortable or she doesn't trust herself to handle them well, which is unfortunate as they, in my reading anyway, deeply informed Tiptree/Sheldon's writing. These include Sheldon's experiences of sexual abuse/assault, imperialism's ghosts, and Sheldon's codependent relationships with her husband and her mother.

Bryan Alexander

"those 8 years in sf was the first time I could be really real" 
-Alice B. Sheldon (367)
This is a powerful, vital biography of one of modern sf's greatest writers. It sheds light on an unusual life and career, while illuminating science fiction genre history _and_ connecting with major issues of our time around gender, identity, and science.

I read Tiptree/Sheldon's stories and novels during the last decade of her life and following years. As a teenager they awed and confused me. As a college student they wowed me even more, as my understanding deepened and I immersed myself in the American and British New Waves. I remember learning about the deaths of Sheldon and her husband. In my late 20s I taught one story, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In", in a graduate class. I knew something of that period's genre history, but didn't know enough about Tiptree, so was happy to be gifted with this biography. (If you're new to Tiptree/Sheldon, here's my review of the best short story collection.)

Julie Phillips takes us through Alice Sheldon's life, starting with her extraordinary mother and ending with her tragic death in 1987. Phillips gives us Alice's (always "Alli") privileged upbringing, including multiple African safaris as a girl (!), her education, first marriage, army career in WWII, second marriage, CIA stint, PhD in psychology, then the late in life stellar career in science fiction. Throughout Phillips immerses us in Alli's voice through her journals and always industrious letter-writing. We hear Alli being ferociously creative, deeply reflective, wracked by desires for love, sex, career, and impact. She keeps shifting her focus on different ways of being, ever seeking the right way for her to be in the world, and never ultimately finding it. She kept developing new identities, new masks for the world. Her last years seem to have been an agony of ferocious pressures on her marriage, her body, her sexuality, her friendships, and her creativity. It's an amazing read, an in-depth character study.

I was surprised to learn many details, such as Alli and her second husband's brief career as chicken farmers, or that she wasn't really a top-level lifelong CIA agent, or that she did major work in photo intelligence during WWII. I didn't know she came from such privilege (see below). It's amazing to think of her working and exploring in the Third Reich's ruins. Her drug intake was epic, akin to the more celebrated levels of Phil Dick. And I was unaware of her many close (if mostly epistolary) relationships with contemporary sf authors. I'm still trying to imagine what a Phil Dick-James Tiptree collaboration could have looked like (he offered, she didn't reply) (237).

Phillips does a fine job of connecting biography to art. I'm normally skeptical about this form of criticism, but The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon makes convincing arguments for "Tiptree" drawing on events and preconceptions in Allie's life. Her connections to feminist writers gave me new insights into the works of Russ, Leguin, and more. To her credit, Phillips also delves into the major stories and two novels on their own terms, farther than most biographers would go, revealing her to be a perceptive reader.

Phillips is also a fine nonfiction writer. She chooses superb passages from Alli's writing to cite, and reflects on them with subtlety and perception. For example,
"I love you so damn much it hurts," she wrote [to her parents in 1957], and her parents' friends were impressed by her loyalty. She did love them, but it did hurt. (191)

She teases out meanings from the many Sheldon texts, connecting them to diverse aspects of her biography. Moreover, Phillips isn't afraid to show Sheldon in a negative light, as when she learns that she hates teaching (206).

Phillips is also capable of disagreeing with Sheldon, despite her obvious admiration for her subject. Tiptree often wrote with an emphasis on biology's fierce power, and Sheldon as a psychologist and intellectual in general often saw evolution overpowering everything before it. But Phillips falls on the cultural side of this argument (292).
Despite all Alli's worrying at the biological foundations of male and female, her performance reminds us that gender is a social construct, one made by writers and readers both. (373)

One of the ironies of Allie's career as Tiptree is that she insisted most on the biological, essential nature of gender at the moment she seemed to be proving that it was all an act, that gender was what you said it was after all. (294)
(I'm more on Tiptree/Sheldon's side, personally. Despite my training and professions as a cultural worker, as the UN says, and even after raising myself on 1970s sf and politics, I think we're been learning too much about the brain and human development to not credit the biological side. Plus much of current culture seems hell-bent on reifying gender division.)

The only criticism I have of the book is its blindness about Sheldon's class privilege. She was born into serious wealth - hence a succession of private schools (including a Swiss boarding school), international expeditions, lavish living spaces, coming out as a society debutante, and of course experiencing no material want as a child and teenager. Sheldon never lost this powerful money support through her life. When Alli announces her intention to wed a second time, her mother reacts with the powers of the 1%:
As soon as Mary heard the news she wrote her friend Lila, and former Mrs. Henry Luce, and asked her for the New York lowdown on her prospective son-in-law. Sources at Time could find nothing terrible on Ting in their files.(134)
While Phillips shows us her subject exploring and shifting careers, at no point does Sheldon select one because it will pay the bills. Later in life Tiptree/Sheldon "liked being paid", but clearly didn't need the money (233). This placed the author in a very unusual position as a writer, especially one writing as a woman in a field that sometimes devalued female authors. It would be good to learn how that shaped her approach to fiction. It would be useful to know how Sheldon reflected on being wealthy, if she did at all. Intersectionality is hard to do. 

Otherwise, I strongly recommend this biography to anyone interested in science fiction, or contemporary women authors, or to readers who like well-written biographies. It's vital for anyone concerned about feminism in the 21st century, because, among other things, it shows previous instances of many debates we're still having, from biology versus culture to the representation of women in sf.

James Tiptree, Jr. The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

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