(by Julie Phillips) The book was extremely interesting and held my attention throughout. I’ve never been a big fan of biographies before, but this was either exceptionally well written, hit my interests spot on, or I’ve come to enjoy the complexities of a full life.
Alli’s life was full and complex. She grew up half smothered under parental love, but was also dragged along on long journeys from the time she was six. He parents were famous and a part of the society scene, and her mom in specific was highly respected. Alli tired early on of being told, “if you grow up to be half the woman your mother is…”
Alli seems bright, but very prone to the trap of originality. Throughout her life she struggled with big issues [the relations of male and female, the role of artists], but seemed determined to intuit her way to solutions rather than learning from others. Part of her problem stemmed from a lack of good woman role model in art and the other fields that interested her.
Her life wasn’t a string of successes, though the support of her family meant that her failures could be weathered in some comfort. She was impulsive– she married her first husband four days after meeting him. It didn’t work out very well– they were both rebellious and felt it was their duty to shock and provoke society. Alcohol and drugs made their marriage a difficult one to endure. It was stormy, with lots of shouting, threats, and temporary separations. They soon moved on to a full divorce.
At loose ends, she joined the army auxiliaries in the 1940s, survived the absorption of the auxiliaries into the full army, learned the tricks of analyzing surveillance photos, and found her husband “Ting”. They had a shaky marriage as the war wound down and they transitioned to civilian life, and soon decided to move to a farm and breed chickens. That lasted for almost five years before they drifted back into city life and joined the new CIA. Her husband did very well in the CIA, but Alli bounced from assignment to assignment and wasn’t looking forward to a career well behind her husband. Her introversion surfaced strongly and reacted badly to the stress and long hours of CIA life– she could project a cheerful front, but it wiped her out. (This entire time was trying to their marriage; she disappeared for months and they considered divorce, but they negotiated a very non-standard arrangement. They soon came to really love each other and twined deep into each other.)
She retired from the CIA and went into research. She enjoyed research and learning, but was terrible at getting along with her department, didn’t want to go through applying for grants, and picked a great singular topic for research– a fascinating study about novelty. But it wasn’t really structured to lead to a stream of research on the topic and she soon after defending her thesis, she left the life of research behind.
Throughout her life, Alli had a strained relationship with her mom, but now her mom was suffering more severely from aging. Alli also struggled with depression throughout her life, and particularly after her stint in the CIA, amphetamine addiction.
She was in her fifties by now and kind of at loose ends. She submitted some quickly written short stories and was amazed when they were accepted. She sent them in under the name James Tiptree, Jr.– whimsically selected from a jar of jam and joking with her husband.
Her pen name allowed her a whole new world of relationships with editors, fans, and fellow authors. Her life’s experiences were well suited to a man’s history, allowing her to write without much separation from herself. She kept her real identity hidden for almost a decade despite increasing curiosity from the whole science fiction community. During this time she established several strong relationships with other authors– including Ursula LeGuin, who she nicknamed Starbear. After his mother’s death Tiptree’s identity fell apart, robbing her of the solace the alter ego had provided. [Particularly interesting to me was the strength of her connection to LeGuin– she was the first person Alli wrote when she was warned that her secret was unraveling.]
Thereafter she wrote fewer stories, as age struck her husband and herself. Their yearly vacations to the lodge, Canada, and Mexico became more complicated (due to health issues) and finally had to be set aside. Eventually she killed Ting and herself at home.
There’s a lot of very interesting stuff that I skimmed right by– her sexuality and her lifelong questions about it, her early career as a painter, and a lot of interesting depth about all of her relations. It made for fascinating reading, and is a book I highly recommend.