James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B Sheldon

James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon is a biography by Julie Phillips. It was Alan's pick for June and the winner of this month's poll.

PLEASE NOTE NEW LOCATION! Our regular rain location Sony Wonder Studio is closed on Sundays, so we are meeting here instead. In case the weather forecasters are wrong, we can walk to a nearby park if there is interest in doing so.

Here's a brief description of the book from Publisher's Weekly, taken from Amazon.com: "Journalist Phillips has achieved a wonder: an evenhanded, scrupulously documented, objective yet sympathetic portrait of a deliberately elusive personality: Alice Sheldon (1915-1987), who adopted the persona of science fiction writer James Tiptree Jr. Working from Sheldon's (and Tiptree's) few interviews; Sheldon's professional papers, many unpublished; and the papers of Sheldon's writer-explorer-socialite mother, Phillips has crafted an absorbing mélange of several disparate lives besides Sheldon's, each impacting hers like a deadly off-course asteroid. From Sheldon's sad poor-little-rich-girlhood to her sadder suicide (by a prior pact first shooting her blind and bedridden husband), Sheldon, perpetually wishing she'd been born a boy, made what she called "endless makeshift" attempts to express her tormenting creativity as, among others, a debutante, a flamboyant bohemian, a WAC officer, a CIA photoanalyst, and a research scientist before producing Tiptree's "haunting, subversive, many-layered [science] fiction" at 51."

As always, any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to e-mail me. Thanks!