First, thank you to whoever kindly paid to upgrade my Dreamwidth account for two months! It's much appreciated, even as it also served as a reminder that I haven't done that much blogging lately. So on that note...
The recent rather heated chatter about SFWA provided one unexpected benefit: I learned that someone named Robin Roberts had written
a semi-official biography of Anne McCaffrey, which I somehow missed when it came out in 2007. I guess I was doing a lot of things. Anyway, I've picked it up now.
I'd say almost everyone reading this blog is familiar with science fiction/fantasy writer Anne McCaffrey, arguably best known for her Pern series, which featured another world filled with telepathic dragons, and for being one of the first science fiction authors to make regular appearances on the New York Times bestseller list. The biography covers this, her early life, her marriage, her relationship with her agent Virginia Kidd, her move to Ireland, and a few other gossipy bits.
It's a somewhat odd biography for a number of reasons. Robin Roberts, the author, appears to have more training in academic writing than popular narrative biography. The biography has several places where the timeline is not at all clear. In addition, I get the sense that she wanted to say more, and couldn't, either for legal or other reasons (not enough documentation.) She's not helped by the fact that many of the people discussed in the biography are still very much alive, or were when she was writing the book, including McCaffrey herself and McCaffrey's ex-husband. * So Roberts gives us a lot of information about agent and editor Virginia Kidd (dead), a nicely salacious story about Isaac Asimov (also dead) at Boskone and a throwaway mention that Marion Zimmer Bradley (also also dead) once hit on McCaffrey and that McCaffrey used to go bar hopping to pick up guys, and then drops back to maddeningly discreet hints about other things, which would be less maddening if not for what was already revealed. Mind you, these hints are almost certainly about considerably less interesting or exciting events, but still.
The perhaps most notable gap is with Betty Ballantine, one of McCaffrey's long time editors, all the more glaring thanks to a chapter liberally quoting McCaffrey's correspondence with Kidd, and a offhand concession that Ballantine, not Kidd, helped shape
Dragonquest -- the novel that was to help establish Pern as a series. Since McCaffrey's cowriters are also alive, they, too, feel notably absent, with the arguable exception of Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. This is particularly odd since Roberts suggests that McCaffrey was pressured into these co-written books by editor Bill Fawcett, described by Roberts as "aggressive." I sense Roberts believes that McCaffrey should have spent the last years of her career focusing on her own work instead of these co-written projects, but it seems something that could have been explored more.
Roberts also has some rather odd choices of which of McCaffrey's books and characters to focus on. Killashandra Ree gets several passing mentions, but Roberts never stops to tell readers anything about
Crystal Singer or its sequels. None of the Pern novels are examined in any depth.
Dragonflight is mentioned several places, but never discussed, odd since based on other parts of the biography, McCaffrey's troubled marriage seems to shed some light on that book, and vice versa. In part this is because Roberts earlier wrote a second book focusing just on McCaffrey's fiction, but the standard for literary biography is to include a couple of paragraphs about the author's major works, and
Dragonflight, the first of the Pern novels, would certainly seem to merit that attention here. The books Roberts does discuss tend to be McCaffrey's Gothics. It seems Roberts assumed that most readers of the biography would know McCaffrey's science fiction and fantasy. Pern, certainly; I'm less certain about the rest of McCaffrey's works.
This also results in a surprisingly
short book. I thought at 243 pages it was already slim for a biography; finding out that forty of these pages contain an index and endnotes with
very wide margins just emphasizes how short the book is.
That said, reading about what influenced McCaffrey as a writer and the struggles she went through was illuminating. McCaffrey had certain advantages: a Radcliffe education, a husband who supported her financially if not emotionally as she started to write; a family that had encouraged wide and deep reading. Against this, she faced major sexism inside and outside the publishing industry (her experiences unquestionably shaped many aspects of the earlier Pern books), an abusive husband, multiple episodes of depression, and severe self-esteem problems, not helped by the sexism. She was a trailblazer, but it was not an easy trail to blaze. It's not mentioned in the biography, but it cannot have helped that just as she finally got fully "established," (if by "established" we mean "New York Times bestseller") she came into criticism for being too popular. Her science fiction was often criticized for not being "scientific" enough, or having too much romance. Interestingly enough, one main criticism I hear now about the Pern books is that the romance in the Pern books really isn't romantic at all, but borderline abusive, especially in the earlier Pern books.
As a writer, I must note that it was more than a bit depressing to read that you can earn the Hugo, Nebula, and New York Times bestsellerdom and
still be subject to depression, insomnia, massive doubts about your writing,
and financial stress. Sigh. To be fair, the financial stress came largely from McCaffrey's legendary financial generosity, so legendary that although it's not mentioned here, at Dragoncon in the late 90s and 2001 unsourced rumor had it that McCaffrey's entourage – her three children, agents, editors and assistants – deliberately vetted fans for financial problems to ensure that McCaffrey wouldn't get taken in by another sob story. From the biography these rumors seem to be greatly exaggerated, but McCaffrey certainly did help out multiple family members, and the biography blames her multiple and not always successful collaborations with various midlist authors in the 1990s on this same generosity. Still.
One minor warning: one or two minor editing issues slipped through here and there. For instance, after continually referring to McCaffrey's elder brother as Hugh throughout most of the book, Roberts suddenly and without explanation calls him "Mac," which leads to a bit of confusion. It's still worth picking up if you're interested in a brief read about one of science fiction's trailblazers.
*
Incidentally, this is also the first biography I've read where I can confidently say I've met many of the people mentioned.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
