Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton by Diane Wood Middlebrook SIGNED! [ FIRST EDITION / FIRST PRINTING]

Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton by Diane Wood Middlebrook

SIGNED FIRST EDITION • FIRST PRINTING [1998] HOUGHTON MIFFLIN 

*Title page is signed and inscribed "For Tom, with delight in our collaboration!" by author Diane Wood Middlebrook.

Hardcover with dust jacket in excellent condition.  Minor shelf wear; reads like new w/ a hint of subtle tanning to pages. 

The jazz pianist Billy Tipton was born in Oklahoma City as Dorothy Tipton, but almost nobody knew the truth until the day he died, in Spokane in 1989. Over a fifty-year performing career, Billy Tipton fooled nearly everyone, including Duke Ellington and Norma Teagarden, five successive wives with whom Billy lived as a man, and three children who he "fathered." 

As Billy Tipton herself said, "Some people might think I'm a freak or a hermaphrodite. I'm not. I'm a normal person. This has been my choice." This jazz-era biography evokes the rich popular-music history of the Great Depression and reads like a detective story.