the swimming pool is empty

[freckles_and_doubt]

It's been a bookish sort of 10-day vac. Yesterday I finished reading the new biography of James Tiptree Jr., apparently written over ten years by one Julie Phillips. It shows. This was a beautifully researched, meticulously written, empathetic, insightful and generally socks-knocking-off piece of writing. It was also, weirdly enough, reviewed as a major article in the New York Times, suggesting that we are suffering, slowly but inevitably, the drift of sf into the mainstream. I'm not quite sure if I should be glad or twitchy.

Anyway, James Tiptree. Amazing science fiction writer writing mostly in the 60s and 70s, producing hard-hitting, sexy, often blackly comic, rather bleak and amazingly feminist stories, two of which my third-year sf students basically fail to get year after year. Tiptree was also the pen name for Alice Sheldon, which means she wrote as a male persona, a deception jealously guarded for most of her writing life - she existed as a post office box and a bunch of in-persona correspondance with fellow sf writers. Given her personality - depressive, dramatic, unstable, lacking in self-esteem, amphetamine-using and a closet lesbian frustrated and alienated by her female identity - the persona became absolutely essential to her writing, the only way she could actually express herself. Her writing was never as easy or successful after her actual identity was discovered, and she killed her husband and herself a few years later.

I am somewhat stunned by how this life story has hit me, given that it's basically as depressing as hell. Tiptree is one of my favourite sf writers of all time; I respect her work intensely. It's somehow reassuring to discover that a figure I admire so much can turn out to be a mass of insecurities and disfunctions, experiencing a successful career only very late in life (she was in her 50s when she was first published), and continually dogged by a sense of inadequacy. If she could be all that and still produce "The Women Men Don't See" or "The Screwfly Solution", perhaps there's hope for the rest of us. Especially for me.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

It seems an awful lot of writers get started pretty late, and I suspect the writing is all the better for it. Similarly, the dysfunction and insecurity helps enormously with creativity. I get depressed when I worry that I'm far too happy to ever write anything interesting.

Then again I'm not so much wanting to write these days, so that's okay.

scroob

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Having just read those two stories, the author of "The Screwfly Solution" would I think have to be a mass of insecurities and disfunctions.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

What interests me is her particular insecurities about being a woman: she has this very clear, urgent, rather despairing sense of female identity in a man's world, which is exaggerated in its expression by her personal disfunctions, but remains valid and insightful. SF is absolutely the only possible genre for her to write in because of its symbolic tools for dealing with alienation, I think.

[(Anonymous)]

Seems like there's a lot of pressure (from society in general) to be 'successful' as soon as possible. How do you measure success? And why does it have to be by a certain age? I don't understand that. I guess there's always that sense that time will run out, because death is inevitable and all that, but each year or month or week or whatever is new, and we bring more experiences with us that have enriched us and/or made us grow in some way (I'm thinking of new year blog entries, and scroob's fairly recent on on being in ones 30's). Time is our enemy, but also our friend.
everymoment, caught in a philosphical wossname.

The timeline of success

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

I've experienced this lately in my workplace. So many of my colleagues who are my age have already finished their degrees and are busy with their articles or CA board exams. When I mention that I'm planning on starting my BCompt next year they look at me in horror, like "omg! you're 26 and you're only starting your studies next year! you'll be, like, 35 when you finish and qualify!" and I think "yes, so? It's a long-term plan. There's so much pressure in the accounting field to be qualified by the time you're 30 and I don't understand why. Perhaps for women it's the must-qualify-before-I-pop-out-the-babies thing (I've heard that from a few people now). Eish. People are living longer lives now, there's much more time to get somewhere in your career, or even change your career in midlife and still make a success of the new one.

Re: The timeline of success

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Darned capitalism, with its fetishisation of Success and Money: what about Maturity and Enjoyment, huh, capitalism? didn't think of that, I bet.

I think Scroob is right, with writing particularly it's probably a good thing to delay a bit. SF is a bit funny in that it has a solidly successful subset of the sort of Young Turk style of fizzing, explosive immature writer, but I suspect that says something about the maturity of the genre...