glaurung | (Reply)

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I read this book, too, and agree completely about how fabulous it is, and especially that

She desperately wanted to paint, to write masterpieces... but every time she set brush to canvas or pen to paper, the result wasn't as good as the idea in her head, and fell far short of her exacting standards of accomplishment, so she gave up on painting, and gave up on writing, too, until late in life she found that she could write by pretending to herself that it was only SF, it wasn't serious, it wasn't Literature or Her Life's Work, and what's more, she wasn't writing it anyway, it was the work of her male alter ego, a mask she wore that enabled her to write without worrying about whether what she wrote was good enough.

As a not-very-related aside, the thing that really made me argh was the bit about the safari, where she heard cannibals tearing a man apart and was expected to sleep with a baby gorilla in formaldehyde under her bed. And then her parents took her to Calcutta, where she had to step over dead bodies in the street. Argh! I'm 40 and would have trouble coping with that.

There are so many places where I wonder if things would have been different for her, but her sexual identity is a big one. I do think she had a biochemical problem, but it's really hard to tell when there's such a huge divide between a person and the role they feel they have to play.