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 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.