Tiptree and Russ
I'm still reading the Tiptree bio. Getting close to the end; I'm becoming more and more aware of what I had put out of my mind for much of it, the knowledge that it ends with her killing herself and her husband.
But right now, I'm still fascinated by the look at her life. I used almost no book darts in the first half of the book; but right around the time when she became a science fiction writer, there started to be more and more that I wanted to bookmark and/or comment on.
The part that I'm really loving at the moment is the excerpts from letters written to Tiptree after she was exposed/came out as female. There are lovely notes from several of her epistolary friends, most particularly Le Guin. (Added later: I meant to also mention that I found Silverberg's response especially gracious, given the whole "ineluctably masculine" thing.)
And I've always liked Russ's work, but her letters quoted throughout this book make me like her even more. I just read the letter on pp. 370-371 in which she propositions Tiptree/Sheldon; it's lovely. In a book filled with people who didn't seem to understand Sheldon--most notably, in this section, her psychologist, who seems to me to have given her some stupendously bad advice--it's really nice to see someone who understood and appreciated her for who she was.