Julie Phillips (1) (1943–)

Alice Sheldon is an enormously captivating individual. Born into the shadow of her socialite writer mother, she traveled extensively in the Belgian Congo in her youth, volunteered for the Women's Army Corps during the Second World War, ran a chicken hatchery in Wisconsin, worked for the CIA in the developing field of aerial photo intelligence, and (most germane to this biography) in her twilight years established herself as an author of SF under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. The story of show more Alli/Tiptree is one of the most interesting subplots of the New Wave movement and should receive more attention.

For all of that external success, Alli's internal world is even more intriguing and devastating. Sheldon suffered profoundly, wrestling with a disappointment with the world and humanity for most of her life. She was incredibly sensitive to the suffering she saw around her and never developed a callus to protect herself from it. While her second marriage ended with love and platonic companionship, her romantic and sexual interest towards women would go unfulfilled throughout her life. As she battled with her own relationship to gender, she watched numerous women's movements collapse in the first half of the century. As a consequence of these trials, she frequently fell into depressive episodes and struggled to maintain the facade of Victorian stoicism that she so desperately wished to have in front of everyone. She rarely let anyone into her internal world despite an aching loneliness that certainly escalated her tendency towards thoughts of suicide. While Alli's thoughts and opinions are sometimes at odds with each other, it's this duality that makes her so special. Phillips does an excellent job of portraying all of these complexities with a compassionate empathy.

The highlight of the entire biography is certainly the extensive amount of diary entries and correspondence that Phillips included, which gives Sheldon plenty of space to ruminate on her own life. This approach respects Alli's voice and pace, allowing her to reveal herself on her own terms. I found a lot of Alli's introspective writing really powerful and beautiful, even more so than the small amount of her fiction that I've read. I do appreciate that Phillips understands when to just shut up, but if you're looking for the author to provide their own voice or narrative, this is not the work for you.

What Phillips does really well though is providing thoughtful secondary analysis. She goes much farther than just plain factual statements, doing her best to critically examine both Alli's fiction and nonfiction to better understand her. Out of all the biographies I have read, this was perhaps the best in that aspect. I'll certainly be returning to my copy as I read more of Tiptree's works in the future to compare my thoughts with those of Phillips.

That said, it can be quite chewy to read. I wouldn't categorize Phillips as a supreme prose writer, but certainty a strong academic. While it would certainly help to have an interest in SF and its history, you don't explicitly need it to find enjoyment and emotion here. I'd be shocked if you didn't find one or more of Alli's many faces deeply relatable and compelling. show less

Julie Phillips’ The Baby on the Fire Escape (2022) is a collection of biographies and essays about 20th century artists and writers who are mothers. Alice Neel (the one accused of leaving the baby on the fire escape to paint, giving the book its title), Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Legion, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and Angela Carter all have their own chapter, intersped with short essays. Biographies focus on artists’ path before and to motherhood, whenever possible the details of how they show more adapted to motherhood (we read about Leguin’s routine of chores and childcare, or Walker’s children commenting on not having elaborate lunch boxes), and what happened after those responsibilities eased.

The essays bring together threads across biographies: different ways of combining or separating creative work and parenthood (“All the time”: Art Monsters and Maintenance Work, Poems are Housework, The Baby on the Writing Desk), returning to creative work past the intensive years of motherhood (Ghosts, Late Success), the suffering and obstacles to being a full self and ways of coping with contradictions and circumstances (The Unavailable Muse, Not Being All There), the role of contraception (The Presiding Genius of Her Own Body), sexuality and love (Sex and love). Toni Morrison, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her care performances, Louise Bourgeois, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Smart, Shirley Jackson, make an appearance among others. The concluding chapter illuminates the author’s own relationship to motherhood and the writing craft. The project began when her children were of elementary school age. It is published as they have left for university. A red thread neatly tied: creative mothers need to play the long game.

Some biographies go into far more details than others about how mothers made it work. The chapter on Ursula K. Leguin stands out in that regard. Leguin has written about her experiences of motherhood and writing and Phillips is working on her biography and. The diversity of practices, and the historical span of the book renders direct comparison between the women depicted impossible, but highlights the changing material circumstances that 20th century’s fights for women’s rights help secure. If Phillips highlights the resolve each of these figures needed to continue their craft, the book avoids the pitfalls of a “Nevertheless, She Persisted” slogan. She shows the toll, the losses, the ones who lost themselves. And of course we will never know about those who haven’t been able to reconcile motherhood and creative practice.

We read Phillips’ book for the December book club of Mothers in Art and Design (aka MAD). It touched on many of our own concerns - finding space and time for our practice, making sense of motherhood for ourselves, and the kind of mothers we want to be, can be. The Baby on the Fire Escape is neither self-help nor a parenting book, but it does outline diverse ways of doing that can be learned from. We debated what the book does and what it doesn’t and that we’d love to see. The book contributes to discourses about art and parenthood that now well acknowledge the many barriers encountered by artists and the material and relational resources they need, whether they continue practicing or take a break. A partner supportive at home and in one’s career, friends and family involved in their children’s lives, financial security, flexibility in their travel arrangements. The earliest biographies were (unsurprisingly?) found harder to understand or relate to, again a testament to the progress of women’s rights. More acutely aware of the details of the writing craft, some wished for accounts of arts practices that discuss more closely the changes of medium and themes during early motherhood, due to access to studio space, materials or tools safety and the interruptions that some crafts can not accommodate. We wished also to hear more about their children’s views - while growing up, later as adults, and as they bring to the world their own children.

What I retain from this book is that, if few chapters show a happy combination of motherhood and practice, and if none are depicted as easy, the book felt hopeful. It’s not about making it work perfectly, it’s about making the best choices at a given time for our now many selves. It also anchors our January pick, “Everything She Touched”, a biography of Ruth Asawa by Marylin Chase, in a broader historical landscape.

Originally written for Mothers in Art and Design show less

http://nhw.livejournal.com/816992.html

This is surely a model of how to write a biography. Although her subject died in 1987, Julie Phillips has been through all her private papers, done the necessary bureaucratic sleuthing through her career, dug into her parents' background, interviewed the elderly first husband and many other relatives and friends, reflected on the wider social and literary currents of the time illustrated by the main narrative, and supported it all with extensive show more notes.

But that's not enough to make a successful biography. To do that you have to not only know your subject; you have to have chosen someone who is in some way fascinating in their own right, and be able to communicate that fascination to your readers. Phillips has done that admirably. I haven't read a lot of Tiptree's work (having said which, there isn't so very much to read), but I think you could safely give this book to someone who had never heard of her, even someone who never reads science fiction, and sill expect them to enjoy it.

Most readers, however, will have bought this book largely to find out more about Tiptree/Sheldon's writing; we don't get anything about that until halfway through, but I don't think anyone will be bored by the first fifty years of Sheldon's life - privileged Chicago upbringing, childhood safaris to Africa, a Christmas elopement and disastrous first marriage, World War II and the CIA, psychological research, a better choice of second husband. And then the decade of fame as SF writer James Tiptree, Jr, producing strange, memorable stories, winning Hugos and Nebulas for them, engaging in intimate correspondence with the luminaries of the genre, but all under a pseudonym which was eventually exposed. I had not realised, however, that the Hugo and nebula for "Houston, Houston, Do You Read" both came after the revelation of her true identity.

The one weak point in Phillips' analysis has been well illuminated by Farah Mendlesohn: she doesn't convincingly explain Sheldon's attitude to sexuality - in fairness, a complex question, and one to which we will probably never know the real answer (although Farah's answer is more convincing than Phillips').

I am in a rush this morning in Georgetown, just a few miles from where Alice Sheldon and James Tiptree lived and died, so don't have time to write more about this brilliant book. But we are promised that the paperback will include more photographs, and more of Sheldon's own art, so I may find myself buying it all over again. show less

James Tiptree, Jr. wrote some truly astonishing science fiction stories, works that were bleak, poetic, and beautiful, filled with themes of love and death, sex and gender, power and empathy, and twin longings for the alien and for home. He was also a prolific letter-writer, forming many long-distance friendships in the SF community... and a notorious recluse who would never agree to meet anyone in person or even talk on the phone. There were many rumors about his true identity, including show more one that he was so secretive because he worked for the CIA. When Tiptree's secret finally came out -- that "he" was, in fact, a woman named Alice Sheldon -- it was to a chorus of both shocked surprise and "Aha, I knew it!"

Sheldon's life was a complex and fascinating one, from accompanying her famous explorer parents on their African expeditions as a small child, to the murder-suicide that finally ended her life. At various points, she was a painter, an army officer, a psychological researcher, and the co-runner of a chicken hatchery. Oh, and yes, she did in fact also work for the CIA.

This biography covers all of that, but its main focus is Sheldon's psychology, and on the matters that obsessed and troubled her and found reflection in her work. Including, most particularly, the question, as author Julie Phillips puts it, of "what is a woman and am I one." It's a question she never did seem to unravel, even with the assistance of a male alter ego. Which seems like no surprise at all to me, being as it is, a tangled, thorny complicated mess of social expectation, biology, sexuality, personal identity, and power dynamics. Hell, I can't unravel it, either, and I was born many decades later into a world where the expectations and the limits placed on women were already significantly changing.

Anyway. This is an interesting, thoughtful, and thought-provoking bio, and I do recommended it to those interested in Sheldon's life and work. show less