Suits Me the Double Life of Billy Tipton

Middlebrook, Diane W

ISBN 10: 096505795X / ISBN 13: 9780965057950

Published by Houghton Mifflin Co, 1998

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # S_470793837

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Suits Me the Double Life of Billy Tipton
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 096505795X
• ISBN 13: 9780965057950
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Very minimal signs of shelf wear to cover, but all pages are clean, bright and intact. Binding is tight.

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