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The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem
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38/99
Critics' Rating Index
68/99
Readers' Rating Index
82/99
Scholars' Citation Index
84/99
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About This Book
An NPR Best Book of 2022 An insightful, provocative, and witty exploration of the relationship between motherhood and art―for anyone who is a mother, wants to be, or has ever had one. What does a great artist who is also a mother look like? What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own," but in a domestic space? In The Baby on the Fire Escape , award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy, Phillips evokes the intimate and varied struggles of brilliant artists and writers of the twentieth century. Ursula K. Le Guin found productive stability in family life, and Audre Lorde's queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms. Susan Sontag became a mother at nineteen, Angela Carter at forty-three. These mothers had one child, or five, or seven. They worked in a studio, in the kitchen, in the car, on the bed, at a desk, with a baby carrier beside them. They faced judgement for pursuing their creative work―Doris Lessing was said to have abandoned her children, and Alice Neel's in-laws falsely claimed that she once, to finish a painting, left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. As she threads together vivid portraits of these pathbreaking women, Phillips argues that creative motherhood is a question of keeping the baby on that apocryphal fire escape: work and care held in a constantly renegotiated, provisional, productive tension. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary life.
Reviews
"Phillips's insights—like the disconnect between a creative's expectation of unbroken focus and the reality of mothering as a state of constant interruption—are essential, but stacks of quotes from famous writers, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and others turn into litanies."
"Phillips admits there is no simple answer to her overarching question ..."
"Phillips explores and explodes the interpenetrations among motherhood and authorship—as a profession and a passion—through analyses of women novelists ..."
"Phillips moves deftly through key moments in the lives of her subjects and asks of them (and us): How do you make time for, much less nurture, creativity in the face of parenting?"
"Phillips can't resist a good story or a good quote, so her book brims with both ..."
"Although cultural clichés have long presented motherhood as an unchanging state, a woman's apotheosis, Phillips argues instead that its essence is transformation."
"The result is a memorable examination of game-changing artists."
"What emerges most strongly from Phillips's study is the fact that invisible social structures have, for generations, failed women, their children and their art."
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