"James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon"
Julie Phillips introduces the fascinating subject of her biography: A sophisticated, adventurous woman who wrote science fiction like a sophisticated, adventurous man.
By Salon staff
Read more: Books, Science Fiction
Dec. 14, 2006 | How did you find out about Alice Sheldon? Were you a big science fiction fan?
I wasn't a fan; I hadn't read science fiction since high school. And I don't think you need to know anything about science fiction to read the book; it's about the dilemmas of a woman writer.
But I had been writing a lot about women's lives; almost everything I was writing, from sports features to book reviews, was about women or gender in one way or another. So when I read about a new prize called the Tiptree Award, which is given for a work of science fiction that "expands or explores our understanding of gender," I thought it sounded up my alley. That led me to Tiptree's stories and then to Alice Sheldon's life -- her writer mother, her childhood trips to Africa, her career in intelligence. Then I read some of the letters she wrote as Tiptree, with their intensity and humor -- and I was hooked.
What was your greatest challenge in researching this book?
It was hard for me to explain what women were up against, before feminism, without giving lectures. I had to collect a lot of background on women's experience; and I had to understand myself what it was like to be a young woman in the 1930s.
What happened was, when I found evidence that was either strikingly unjust or memorably weird, I would try to find a way to work it into the book, like the Women's Army Corps making its officers wear girdles (so they would look "military"), or NASA not wanting women astronauts because their breasts would bounce in zero-G and distract the men. And in the end I think those strange specifics helped make my case.
Alice Sheldon made an art out of disguising herself. Was it hard to write a biography of this kind of person? Did you wind up feeling you'd gotten to the real her?
Well, I don't know if you ever get to the "real" anybody; but she had one gate for keeping people out, and once I got past that I did feel I had access to her inner life. Behind the mask, when she was alone, in her diaries, for instance, she was usually fairly honest with herself. A person who appeared more honest, but had many subtle strategies for keeping herself concealed, would I think be much harder to get to know.
No one in her life ever really recognized her, and I felt that to be my responsibility: to show her herself whole. To let her be herself.
If you could discover the truth about one unanswered question or mystery about Sheldon, what would it be?
I still want to know what she was really up to in Mexico in 1941, when she was a bohemian and went to hang around with painters.
It's a tricky business, writing a biography about a figure who's important to a subculture, especially a subculture as feisty as science fiction readers. What's the response been?
Very enthusiastic. I've been thrilled by how warmly the book has been received by science fiction readers -- who are, as you say, not an easy audience. I can say all I want that it's not really a science fiction book; as far as the SF world is concerned, it's theirs. Of course, the other things it's about -- identity, sexuality, feminism -- are all very important to that community, partly because science fiction offers an imaginative space for exploring and playing with these ideas.
I feel very lucky they like the book, because it's also meant getting to talk to some of the people working in that space. The feminist conversation in science fiction is pretty incredible. Ursula Le Guin, Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler, and so many other people whose names you don't know but you should.
A science fiction critic recently told me she saw my book as feminist science fiction's "mission to the rest of the literary world. 'See what you've been missing?'"
What did writing this book lead you to conclude about the belief that women and men have inherently different writing styles?
Oddly enough, I think they do in fact tend to write differently, if only because of their different cultural experiences. I think you can still generalize, a little, as long as you see those generalizations as taking place within a huge range of possibility -- and if you never take your gender assumptions for granted.
Do you have a favorite book from 2006?
Everything good that's been written about Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" is true. It's playful, sad, sophisticated, brilliant. I probably liked it so much for the ways in which it's like "Tiptree." It's another book all about secret identities, gender dysphoria, creativity, and the importance of what Bechdel calls "erotic truth."
Next page: Read an excerpt from "James Tiptree, Jr."