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 and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, who had to choose between her motherhood and herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, who found productive stability in family life; Audre Lorde, whose queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms and Alice Neel, who once, to finish a painting, was said to have left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives.
Julie Phillips is the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning 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.
Title: The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem
Author: Phillips, Julie
ISBN: 9780393088595
Binding:
Publisher: WW Norton & Co
Publication Date: 2022-07-05
Number of Pages: 320
Weight: 0.5031 kg
The Baby on the Fire Escape looks at the extreme ways some female artists have overcome the restraints of parenthood... The book's strength lies in Phillips's nimble talents as a portraitist. -- Lucy Scholes - The Sunday Telegraph
For Phillips, the lives she wants to depict are not accounts of maternal self-sacrifice and denial, but instead, narratives that portray the mother as a hero. -- Frieda Klotz - Sunday Irish Independent