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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt

THE BABY ON THE FIRE ESCAPE

Julie Phillips

Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem

An insightful and provocative exploration of the relationship between motherhood and art through the lives of women artists and writers.

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own," but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? 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 workDoris 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. JJulie Phillips is the National Book Critics Circle Awardwinning author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon and The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem. A biographer and critic fascinated by questions of gender and creative work, she has written for many publications including 4Columns, LitHub, and The New Yorker. The recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, she lives in Amsterdam with her partner and their two children.

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Book Published 2022-04-26 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

I devoured every word of The Baby on the Fire Escape, grateful for its penetrating insights about the idiosyncratic arrangements, logistical and psychological, devised by women artists who become mothers. Phillips's compassionate, clearheaded, and lively book forwards our long, vexed cultural conversation about maternity and art. It made me resee my own life as a writer and parent.

How did a generation of women artists and writers resolve the tension of work and family? Not easily.... In "The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem," Julie Phillips explores how maternity has affected artists and writers - particularly those born in the 1930s, who came of age in the postwar years when women were expected to stay at home with their children. Her focus is on the tug-of-war between books and babies, poetry and prams, art and adolescents. She is interested in the way divided attention and constant interruptions can conspire, along with maternal bliss and maternal guilt, "to erode creative work."... Read more...

Chinese (simpl.): SDX ; Korean: Dolgorae

On Trying to Create Art When the Baby's Crying - A new book explores several major "mother-artists" of the mid-to-late-20th century, and how they managed to be both. Read more...

Excerpt: This Novelist Abandoned Her Toddlers. I Wanted to Know Why. I found a different Doris Lessing in her letters... Read more...

Excerpt: "Complete Attention to Two Things at Once." On the Women Who Rewrote the Motherhood Plot... Read more...

Wonderful... Investigating motherhood as lived by an inspiring group of twentieth-century writers and artists, The Baby on the Fire Escape refutes all received ideas about creativity and absolute solitude. Julie Phillips examines the lives and work of artists from Gwendolyn Brooks to Louise Bourgeois, from Shirley Jackson to Susan Sontag, who refused to choose between intellectual rigor and motherhood, and finds it's the courage to claim their own centrality that defines them as artists.

Before I met Ursula K. Le Guin, I had no personal models for how a woman with children might also be a writer. What I did have was the children. Here, with her customary clarity, with empathy, nuance, and acuity, Julie Phillips questions some of our most admired artists about the ways in which the creativity required by motherhood and the creativity required by art have thwarted and supported them.

Phillips' book is not just a cultural history; it is a testament to endurance and devotion. The entwined work of mothering and creativity is a volatile but illuminating gift. Would that everyone could see it that way. Read more...