A Conversation with Julie Phillips

Last month, Julie Phillips won an NBCC award for her first book, James Tiptree, Jr., a biography of the troubled and brilliant 20th century science fiction writer, Alice Sheldon, who published her odd, fascinating tales under the Tiptree pseudonym. Phillips corresponded with NBCC Board member Jennifer Reese over email last week, about the surprise success of Tiptree, the anxiety of the writing life, and some recent books she likes.

JR: In your NBCC award acceptance speech you said you'd initially thought you were writing James Tiptree, Jr. for the one or two other people as weird as you were. When did you begin to sense that her story had wider appeal? Or are there simply more weird people out there than you'd thought?

JP: While I was writing the book, it was easy to forget that anyone would ever read it. I was living in a foreign city, Amsterdam, and I had two kids while I was working on it. Both those things made my world very small--not necessarily in a bad way. And it was such an obscure subject. I would tell people, "I'm writing a book about a science fiction writer you've never heard of," and no one, not even most science fiction readers, would turn out to have heard of Tiptree. In my mind it was a book about self-transformation, secrets, the act of writing, and what Elaine Showalter called "the psychological conflicts and contradictions of modern female authorship." So I would talk about that, and they would get excited; but you do start to feel a little idiosyncratic when you keep having to explain yourself. I found the material absolutely fascinating, and I loved working on it, but for all I knew it was just me.

I started to suspect something after the manuscript was done, though, because the first reactions to it were so good, and came from so many different kinds of readers. After my editor (who was one of the one or two people) read it, he wrote me, "I was stuck on a plane and I didn't care; I kept passing pages to my wife and saying, 'Here, you've got to see this.' " So I read that e-mail about a hundred times and thought, "Something must be working." And when the blurbs started to come in, and some of the writers I admire most told my editor they liked my book--wow. I would walk around with my feet six inches off the ground for two weeks every time.

Of course writers cope in all kinds of ways with their anxiety about writing and being read. Alice Sheldon's was to pretend to be someone else, but that takes more determination than I have--and more capacity for self-deception, I think. My way was to live on another continent and pretend I was writing for three people.

JR: I'm not sure if I'm pretending to be someone else when I write, or pretending all the rest of the time, but there are definitely two of us. Do you think this is more of an issue for women writers than men?

JP: I don't think it's only for women; a lot of writers say that the self who does their writing is different from the self who goes out to buy milk. And men have played with personae the way Tiptree did. Look at Fernando Pessoa. But I think women in particular have needed to become someone other than themselves in order to write, if only because they feel more constrained in what they can and can't say as themselves. And to write is to claim a certain power--the power to decide how the story goes. As Joanna Russ told Tiptree, "To learn to write at all I had to begin by thinking of myself as a sort of fake man." She needed to imagine herself, not just as someone else, but as someone with more agency than she felt she had. Did you see the recent comments about the Orange Prize, by the way, where one of the judges was once again claiming that women's writing was too domestic? "Women writers don't work hard enough to escape from their own gender and circumstances." Don't they? Should they? Can they? All those questions are at the heart of Alice Sheldon's story.

This is slightly off topic, but I've been thinking again about a book I love, Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle. It involves a young woman who leaves home, takes a new identity, and, to support herself, starts writing romance novels under a pseudonym. She marries, but never tells her husband about her writing. Then she experiments with automatic writing and ends up producing a book of bad poetry that becomes a best-seller. She tries faking her death and starting again, but that doesn't help. So much of what women do is role-playing, trying to fit themselves into prescribed situations. How do you get out of that even when you're writing? At the end I think the heroine decides she's going to write a science fiction novel.

God, ask the woman two questions and you can't get her to stop talking...

JR: You've been reviewing books recently. Is criticism new for you?

JP: I used to write about books a lot, mostly for the Village Voice. They let me write about out-of-print poetry, celebrity biographies, reprints of children's books from 1910, academic volumes about baseball-card collecting, it was great. Tiptree started out as two book reviews, one in Ms. and one in the Voice.

I quit reviewing only when I had to start concentrating on Tiptree--and on supporting myself, which neither book reviewing nor biography is very good for. I just recently started again, so far mostly for Newsday, because I really like the editor there, Laurie Muchnick. The reviews I like most to write are the really long ones. It starts to get fun at about 1200 words, when I can start to create a little world within the review, bring up different ideas, and preferably hold several apparently conflicting opinions at once. I like reading that kind of review, too. I love Joan Acocella's pieces in the New Yorker, and I can read Bookforum and The Women's Review of Books for days

JR: Have you read anything lately that you had strong feelings about?

JP: I've read a lot lately that I like. Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn, The Road, Fun Home, Fortress of Solitude. Some short science fiction by Connie Willis: Even the Queen, a very funny story about mothers, daughters, and the reinvention of menstruation, and Schwarzschild Radius, a beautiful, sad story about World War I imagined as a principle of physics. Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt--maybe because I've been around advertising people who use words as bandages. And Howard Waldrop's short story The Ugly Chickens, about how the dodo was rediscovered (almost) on a remote farm in Mississippi.

I also read We Need to Talk About Kevin, had nightmares all night, and spent the next day in bed. But it's a brilliant book.

I'm looking forward to Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton biography, the new Helen Simpson, and On Beauty, which I've just started reading.

JR: What's your next big project?

JP: I'm hard at work on a new biography, which is very interesting and a lot of fun--I was doing interviews for it when I was in New York for the awards--but I'm not sure yet whether or not it's a book. We'll see. For a long time I didn't think I could handle a new relationship, so to speak. Now I finally feel ready to try out new ideas.

photo: Chris van Houts