Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton

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.

Middlebrook (Anne Sexton: A Biography, Houghton, 1991) will fascinate another large audience with her exhaustive account of the life of jazz musician Billy Tipton. Born Dorothy Tipton in Oklahoma in 1914, and reborn as Billy Tipton in 1933, Billy passed as a man until death at age 74. Suits Me uses family interviews, anecdotes from musicians, jazz fans, lovers ("wives"), and friends to tell the story of a brilliant deception. The sensitive storytelling reveals thought-provoking perspectives about gender and the traditional American family, while capturing the social history of traveling jazz bands for 40 years. The family photographs and letters are particularly noteworthy in the exploration of Billy's life between the sexes, and there are extensive, enlightening notes and a bibliography. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries and/or libraries with women's studies or gay/lesbian/bisexual collections.
-?Lisa N. Johnston, Sweet Briar Coll. Lib., VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kitty Tipton Oakes, the last of several women who had lived as common law wives with jazz musician Billy Tipton (1914^-89), couldn't have chosen a more perceptive and frank biographer than Middlebrook, author of an acclaimed portrait of poet Anne Sexton, to tell the curious tale of Tipton's life. Only in death was it revealed that "he" was a "she," as the final curtain dropped on Dorothy Lucille Tipton's spectacular and nervy 54-year impersonation of a man--the popular pianist, saxophonist, and bandleader Billy Tipton. Diminutive and immaculately groomed, Tipton was talented and ebullient, as well as ambitious and disciplined, managing to conceal her gender from nearly everyone around her, from her band members to most of the women she loved, and her adopted sons. Middlebrook gamely poses and attempts to answer intimate questions concerning the logistics of this complicated deception, but she is most concerned with and sensitive to Tipton's unusual personality and the social circumstances that induced her to carry on this grand masquerade. Always scintillating, Middlebrook vividly describes the jazz scene Tipton reveled in and captures the energy and the enigma of Tipton's brilliant if confounding improvisational life. Donna Seaman