This morning I spent a sunny hour picking sour cherries on a farm five minutes from my parents’ house. It was a stunning crop, the trees all thick with brilliant fruit, and almost all of it ripe. The clusters of cherries looked like Pop Art: stark, amazing, slightly translucent red. We picked nineteen pounds, and it wasn’t easy to stop — there were so many, and they were beautiful and so easy to pick.

Then we came home and I wrote while my parents pitted them. I think I got the better end of the deal.

I’m working on The White Silk Tent, my revision of my grandmother’s memoir. I’ve been reading biographical theory to try to situate myself and my strategies: what kind of voice did I want to use, what sort of other research did I want to do? I thought for a while, and then I started writing. And I’m still thinking, of course. But for now, my version contains three kinds of text:

• Sections of Louise’s original manuscript, very slightly edited for clarity
• Biographical sections based on her manuscript but substantially rewritten and edited, and recast in the third person
• Interpolations in my voice which allow me to comment on her memoir, to add information she didn’t have, to interpret things, etc.

And then, likely, documentary material — text and photos from the trunk of family memorabilia she left to accompany the manuscript, and maybe things from the HRC, as well.

My goal for the summer is to get three chapters completed and polished, so that I’ll have a sense of the process involved in writing the book and the amount of time I’ll need to complete it. And then I’ll need to get back to working on academic projects and thinking about my dissertation — which may also be related to biography. (I’m reading Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography now with great interest. And on that note: you can find my new Goodreads page here.)

I’m reading Julie Phillips’s biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr. It’s excellent and I’m entranced.

In the beginning I was merely interested, because I found it tough to relax into the biographical form as Phillips practices it. Having spent this semester working on (among other things) Austen’s use of modal verbs, I was struck and a little annoyed by Phillips’s use of “must” and “should have,” her reliance on conditional forms to buttress psychological claims about Sheldon. That choice reminded me, not pleasantly, of the more biographical bits of the Gilbert-and-Gubar style of feminist criticism — another critical mode I view with sympathy and support but can’t help quibbling with, either. Phillips’s “musts” seem, at times, to push too hard to nail down the unknowable:

She also acquired a .38 revolver, which she either bought or was given by Bill at a time when a sensational carjacking and murder had made the New Mexico roads seem unsafe. It was this gun, acquired for self-defense, that Alice claimed Bill had used against her. (She also once suggested that she had used it for a game of Russian roulette.) Nonetheless, she kept it. Later in life, whenever she was depressed enough to think of killing herself, she always pictured doing it with the .38. The gun must have given her a sense of power over death. [James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, 96]

That pithy last sentence! Why? It’s a shove from drama into banality. It flattens an ambivalent and interesting and totemic-seeming fact.

I’m quibbling, as I said — the book is just wonderful, and the psychologizing conditional statements either grow fewer, or integrate more smoothly into Phillips’s thoughtful and careful treatment of Sheldon/Tiptree, or both. (I’ll have to reread it to tell; right now I’m too grabbed by it.) But I wish that, in the early chapters, Phillips had allowed more of Alice’s ambivalence to remain unencapsulated.

More on this later, when I’m done with the book.

ETA: I read the last half of the book in a happy rush yesterday and this morning, and while I stand by my quibbling, I think the whole thing’s delightful. The primary sources make up a great portion of the book’s brilliance — Sheldon/Tiptree wrote wonderful letters — but Phillips does a beautiful job, too.