Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton - Hardcover

Middlebrook, Diane Wood

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395654890 ISBN 13: 9780395654897

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1998

Synopsis

The acclaimed author of Anne Sexton: A Biography, a nominee for the National Book Awards, tells the remarkable story of Billy Tipton, a female jazz musician who lived as a man for nearly fifty years. 40,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

Review:

Billy Tipton was a jazz performer who played in clubs throughout the Midwest for nearly 50 years. Tipton never made the big time as a musician and ended up working as a booking agent in Spokane, Washington. Only with Tipton's death in 1989 was it revealed that the five-times-married father to three boys was biologically female. Diane Wood Middlebrook's biography describes the transformation of Dorothy Tipton, a white Oklahoman who was not allowed to play jazz because she was a girl, into Billy Tipton, a male pianist and bandleader. The author traces the life of this itinerant jazz musician over several decades and through changing constructions of gender.

Middlebrook, whose biography of Anne Sexton was noted for its controversial use of tape recordings and notes made during the poet's psychiatric treatment, was approached by Kitty Tipton Oakes, one of Billy's former wives, to write this biography; she interviewed his/her friends, spouses, family members, and colleagues and found them to have different, yet universally sympathetic, readings of Tipton's gender. In addition to examining what gender is, Suits Me also asks to whom it belongs: the individual or the people who interact with the individual. --Rebecca Brown

About the Author:

Dianne Wood Middlebrook is the author of several volumes of poetry and critism as well as the prizewinning bestseller Anne Sexton: A biography. The recipient of many fellowships and awards, she is a professor of English at Stanford University, where she has also served as the director of the center for research on women. She currently lives in San Francisco.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0395654890
• ISBN 13: 9780395654897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 326