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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
Volume of Reviews
33/99
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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
"This is an uneasy book, which raises many more questions than it answers."
"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's sharp observations and candor add force to the survey ..."
"But there are, she concludes, two absolute necessities: time, and a firm sense of what's important to you as a person in your own right."
"Phillips's book is engaging and accessible, especially when carefully discussing the private life of Lorde (a Black lesbian mother) and its influence on her writing; black-and-white portraits of the novelists are a highlight ..."
"Instead of developing complete portraits of the artists and writers, she works to connect themes and ideas."
"By the time the mother of the baby on the fire escape has become the guardian of an empty nest, she has ventured out, fought monsters, faced fears, and become a new version of herself."
"Phillips admits there is no simple answer to her overarching question ..."
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