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

Julie Phillips has done a great service in writing this exhaustive biography of Alice B. Sheldon. Starting from before conception to her untimely suicide in 1987, Phillips explores Sheldon's remarkable life from African explorer, to WAC, to CIA photo analyst, to psychology PhD, to science fiction author (under 3 different names!), to suburban housewife, to feminist. She explores not only Sheldon's life but her stories and novels in detail, elucidating the themes that enlivened her writing.

Minutely researched, there are 50 pages of footnotes, there is also a chronology and two bibliographies. Despite the detail, the text is always lively and engaging, making you want to read just one more chapter before going to bed.

I would recommend show more this not only to fans of Tiptree and science fiction, but to anyone interested in biographies of remarkable people.

Listening to Silly Thing by Cook and Jones show less

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

It has long been tradition in many literary genres – science fiction and the “western” primary among modern ones – that female writers would publish under either a male pseudonym or under gender-neutral first names or only initials. This was often a marketing issue, encouraged (or even demanded) by editors and publishers who were firmly convinced that their reading public simply would not buy material produced by women writers.

Thus, Leigh Brackett (whose given name was vague enough for her to get away with it), Alice Marie Norton (who became André), Mary (M.J.) Engh, Carolyn Janice (C.J.) Cherryh … and Alice B. Sheldon, who turned the science fiction world on its ear as James Tiptree, Jr., in the late 1960s.

But Sheldon was show more not simply choosing a male pen name to slide under readers’ radar. She created a whole persona – a man who wrote tough, often violent, fiction, who “out-Hemingway’d Hemingway” in one critic’s words, and a voice that would allow her to express many of the deep conflicts arising out of a personality tormented by everything from some very deep mommy and daddy issues to intensely repressed sexual attraction to women.

Julie Phillips has created a tour de force with her detailed biography of Sheldon, drawing on letters, journal entries, interviews with family members, friends, and professional colleagues as she presents a portrait of a woman who could neither accept nor reject the limitations placed on well-bred young women of a certain social class in the mid-20th century. Always, always, Alli Sheldon was looking to escape – the duties of a daughter, the confines of marriage, the strictures of sexual identity, the appropriate behaviors and careers for women – yet was never able to make that final break. She fought herself, she took refuge in multiple heterosexual affairs, she frittered away her college years, she dabbled in art, she joined the military but was frustrated by the lack of true opportunity there. She smoked too much, loved too hard, abused too many prescription medications, always looking for her true voice. Her true escape. Her true self.

And somehow James Tiptree, Jr. – a name chosen, she said “as a lark, from a jam label in a grocery store” became not only the identify she affixed to her science fiction stories, but very much an alter-ego. Tiptree could say things no one would listen to, coming from a fiftyish Virginia housewife. He could establish, via a voluminous correspondence with other writers, editors, and publishers, an all-us-boys-together persona and flirt outrageously with his female correspondents. He could give his heroes randy thoughts about the women in his stories – women, who for some reason, seldom seemed interested in traditional (if secondary to the main plotline) romances.

Toward the end of Tiptree’s writing career, in the late 70s, Phillips shows us a creative mind struggling to free itself from its own construct, becoming more and more frantic to replace Tiptree with yet another persona as she begins to write from a frankly feminist viewpoint under the name Racoona Sheldon. At the same time, Alli is struggling with her aging mother’s failing health, her much-older husband’s decline, and the grim economic reality that even Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction writers can seldom make much of a living at the craft.

The conclusion, already known to those who followed Tiptree’s career, casts a pall over the final portion of the book as it plays out to its inevitable end, making it heartbreaking for the reader who has followed this demanding and tortured woman through a life in which goals seem always just out of reach. Still, this is an important book, both as biography and as a study of the rise of the feminist movement of the late 20th century, and the fact that it came too late for many women. show less

I must confess that I've never read any of James Tiptree Jr.'s work, and that I had no idea who this person was prior to picking up Phillips' book. That didn't seem to matter, however, because this was one of the most well-written biographies I've read in quite a long while. Alice Bradley Sheldon was a most interesting subject -- and Phillips does an excellent job in researching, putting together and presenting Sheldon's life both as herself and as James Tiptree, Jr., a writer of science fiction whose works were very well known even though Tiptree himself remained somewhat of an enigma even among his contemporaries in the world of SF writing. I won't go into detail here, because many other reviewers have done so quite well, and there show more are multiple places on the internet to find details about Sheldon.

Phillips' analysis of Sheldon's background, her insecurities, her search for who she really was and wanted to be is very well done. But this isn't just a cut and dried biography. It's a look at a woman trying to find herself through many different persona: daughter of Chicago society parents, eloping at an early age and divorcing, then going into the Army Air Corps, then moving along to work in the CIA, marrying again, obtaining a PhD to do psychological research, and becoming an egg farmer, to name a few. Phillips' argument is that Sheldon knew none of these roles ever truly fitted her, and that by taking on the role of Tiptree, a male science fiction writer, she had finally found a way to give herself an outlet for the person she'd always wanted to be. But even then she still got very caught up in her own turmoil about identity as her Tiptree persona consistently grew in stature and landed him a bit of fame along with awards (Hugo, Nebula); Alice had to devote more of her own lessening energies into maintaining it while trying to keep Alice Bradley Sheldon a secret to her public and science fiction writer friends -- but then at the end of the day as Tiptree, she was still Alice Bradley Sheldon having to contend with herself.

Very well written; I had a lot of difficulty putting it down once I got started. When I can pick up a biography of someone with whom I'm not even vaguely familiar and not want to put it down, that's saying something about the author's writing. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants an intelligent read. show less

In the 1970s, James Tiptree Jr stunned the world of science fiction with a series of dazzlingly provocative short stories, tying up sex and death and xenophilia. Tiptree carried on a deep correspondence with major figures in the field-Philip K Dick, Ursula K LeGuin, and Joanna Russ. Tiptree was an urbane older gentleman who cultivate an air of mystery as an international traveler who worked for an intelligence agency based in McLean, Virginia and loved guns and fishing. Tiptree was described as ineluctably masculine in anthology introductions, scifi's own Hemingway.

Of course, Tiptree didn't exist. He was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon, a 60 year old woman and fascinating character in her own right. Phillips traces Sheldon's life-story show more and literary career, trying to draw out the distress at the heart of her soul.

Alli (her preferred nickname) grew up as a child of privilege in the 1920s. Her mother, Mary Bradley, was a socialite, author, and explorer. At 6 years old, Alli accompanied her parents on a 1400 mile trek across Africa to investigate the Mountain Gorilla, a fantastic journey made possible by hundreds of African porters. Long treks in colonial Africa and Asia were interspersed with a smotheringly protective childhood in Chicago and Wisconsin. Alli was a precocious youth, but her mother was a commanding if distant presence, and Alli never really fit in at a succession of expensive finishing schools. She read Astounding Stories and dream of traveling to Sirius, while struggling with anger, depression, and sexual urges the straight-laced morality of her upbringing left her unable to comprehend. As Philips puts it, Alli was faced with a double-edged sword. She could not do anything worthwhile and become a failure, or she could surpass her mother and become a traitor.

Alli chose a form of rebellion available to rich and pretty debutants, a quick marriage at 19 to William Davey, a Princeton student with poetic aspirations and a drinking problem. The two of them moved to California to continue their studies, and their lives spiraled into chaos. They drank, used drugs, had affairs, abused each other. Alli got pregnant and had an abortion. Their artistic skills didn't match their ambitions, as Davey's long autobiographical novel wandered, and Alli failed to find her voice as a painter in her psychological turmoil. The couple separated in 1937, and were divorced by 1940.

The Second World War offered a chance to serve, and Alli enlisted in the WAAC, where she eventually became a photo-intelligence analyst. 1945 saw her posted to Europe, part of a project to exploit captured Nazi images, where she wound up marrying her commanding officer, Col. Huntington Sheldon. Ting was a stable older man, a former bank who's solid façade concealed a lively inner life and tragic past (a prior wife had gone insane, and he'd essentially abandoned her and their three kids). Alli and Ting tried to run a chicken hatchery, then sold it and wound up back in intelligence at the CIA, where Ting was fairly senior on the analytics side for 17 years, and Alli worked for 4 before quitting. She went back to school, finishing her undergrad and a PhD in psychology, but at the end she was too odd, too old, and too female to make it as an academic in 1967. But she'd written some science fiction stories in the throes of finishing her dissertation, and as Tiptree, she sold. The stories were good!

And what followed was a decade of astounding productivity and deep relationships forged through letters to other authors. Tiptree cultivated a mystique, with Allie and Ting's fishing trips to Canada and Mexico transformed into secret missions to unknown destinations on CIA orders. In the 1970s, science fiction was struggling with feminism, and Tiptree served as an example of a man who got it, who could write women despite unimpeachable manly credentials. But when Tiptree mentioned that his mother, an African explorer, passed away in Chicago, some of his correspondents got newspapers and connected it to the obituary of Mary Bradley, survived by her daughter Alice Sheldon. The gig was up, and while the scifi community forgave the deception, but without the mask Sheldon had trouble finding her voice again.

A major theme of the book is that being Alli was exhausting and frustrating. Alli was too smart and too opinionated to sit back and be a good wife as society demanded. Her lifelong struggles with depression made it hard to maintain friendships. Sex and gender is at the heart of this book, and Phillips is clear that Alli was always more attracted to women than men, but that this attraction was something she never really acted on. Terrified of death and aging, she resolved to make herself sexless for most of her marriage to Ting, and apparently succeeded. I think "lesbian" is a fair descriptor of Sheldon, but a deeper read on gender is trickier. Tiptree was accepted as one of the guys, where Alice would have always had 'woman' prefixed to 'author'. Being someone else let Alice be confident and flirtatious in a way that was hard under her own name. She seemed to have such a commitment to absolute Truth that being able to take a step away and say "well, it's not the truth, but it's Tiptree's version of the truth" was a game that made writing and friendship possible. While Sheldon had a deeply negative to ambivalent relationship with her own femininity, it's hard to separate being a woman from being a woman in 1930s America, which was objectively pretty awful.

And its hard to separate Alli's pained identity from her own struggles with depression and drug addiction (Dexedrine as an anti-depressant, valium to take the edge off the dex, and morphine for arthritis. They just pumped housewives full of drugs). As Alli and Ting aged, she began to get more obsessed with death and with avoiding the slow decline that had claimed her mother. Ting, a decade older, declined first, becoming nearly completely blind. And in May 1987, she killed him and then herself, leaving a suicide note dated 1979. A dramatic end for a dramatic life.

There are flaws in this biography. Phillips takes an uncritical look at Sheldon's wild youth, leaving open key questions like whether Sheldon ever had a successful same-sex relationship against allegations that her first husband caught her going down on another woman at a party and threw her through a window, putting her in the hospital. A possible incestuous encounter with her own mother is similarly impossible to verify, though a similar plot point in the novella A Momentary Taste of Being is evidence in favor, given how much of Tiptree was drawn from life. And despite the ample letters, an adequate summary of Tiptree's role in the 1970s science-fiction community doesn't quite emerge. It's good, but not perfect.

Still, Alli is a fascinating character, and while I'm sympathetic for her pain and wish it were lessened, at least we got some first rate stories out of it. show less

A wonderful read about a writing hero of my youth and a supremely fascinating character. It was a special treat to be privy to Tiptree/Sheldon's correspondence. In addition to the assumed identity, I just found it interesting to hear the things that writers talk about, how friendships are built, etc.
A troubling postscript: though people responded to the fact of Sheldon/Tiptree's suicide, there were no recorded responses to the homicide. The "suicide pact" was clearly Alice's idea, and Ting, her husband, may have agreed to it reluctantly, if he agreed at all. (It was reported that Mr. Sheldon "was not in the mood to leave the world at this time.") She apparently shot him in his sleep. Certainly, this calls for some amount of ethical show more wrestling(?) show less