MADreads

Her smoke will rise up forever

May 12th, 2009 Kylee

It’s been a long time since I read a biography.  In fact, I think the last time I read one, I had to get up in front of the class and give a report about it.  So, I wasn’t sure what to expect from James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.  I figured I’d read about her childhood, her career, and her death - nothing too shocking or exciting.

Well, there were no surprises in the book’s plot - it followed her life, beginning, middle, and end, but I was surprised by how engrossing this factual information actually was.  I’m generally pretty biased - I tend to think nonfiction is boring, simply because of that “non” at the beginning of the word - but I think my reading tastes are finally beginning to evolve.  Or maybe Sheldon’s life is just exciting and quirky enough to satisfy my need for a good story, and author Julie Phillips’s writing is elegant enough to feel like a good “literary” work.

Sheldon’s life is undeniably interesting.  The daughter of a successful writer and lawyer, Alice grew up shuffling between her family’s penthouse in Chicago and their lengthy forays into the African wilderness.  Always a rebellious girl, she eloped the night of her debutante party, and eventually ended up in the armed forces.  After WWII, she and her second husband (her former boss) decided to try their hand at chicken farming, but after a few years of the quiet life ended up with jobs in the CIA.  And then, as if this weren’t enough, after leaving the CIA and earning a PhD in psychology, Alice began to dabble in writing fiction.  In order to protect her shyness and scholarly reputation, she sent her science fiction stories (which she considered a guilty pleasure) to publishers under the name James Tiptree, Jr., a moniker she and her husband jokingly created one day in the grocery store.  Tiptree’s stories were immediately successful, and eventually became some of the most highly respected works in the genre.

I won’t tell you what exactly what happens at the end of her life, but it’s definitely dramatic enough to be a novel.  And with the excerpts from Sheldon’s and Tiptree’s prolific epistolary relationships with other authors (including sci-fi favorites like Philip K. Dick and Ursula LeGuin) that Phillips includes liberally throughout the book, it does almost read like a novel.  I must confess, I haven’t read any of Tiptree’s stories yet, but I was interested in him/her because I’d heard of the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which is given to outstanding works that play with the idea of gender in science fiction - pretty cleverly named, huh?  I highly recommend the 2006 winner, Half Life, by Shelley Jackson, previously reviewed here, and I’m really looking forward to the reading the 2007 winner, Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North.  Another cool fact about the award: it was first announced in 1991 at WisCon, the only feminist science fiction convention, which happens to be held every Memorial Day weekend right here in Madison!

Entry Filed under: Memoir & Biography